History 269 The Civil War and Reconstruction Grant in the Pages of History

Ulysses S. Grant in the pages of history: what contemporaries and historians have said about the greatness of the man.

"I knew [Grant] as a cadet at West point, as a lieutenant of the Fourth Infantry, as a citizen of St. Louis, and as a growing general all through the bloody Civil War.  Yet to me he is a mystery, and I believe he is a mystery to himself....  He does not know as much about books and strict military art and science as some others, but he possesses the last quality of great generalship; he knows, he divines, when the supreme hour has come in a campaign or battle, and always boldly seizes it."--William T. Sherman "The most extraordinary quality of Grant's character... was its extreme simplicity--so extreme that many have entirely overlooked it in their search for some deeply hidden secret to account for so great a character, unmindful that simplicity is one of the most prominent attributes of greatness. --John M. Schofield "The great thing about Grant, I take it, is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose.  I judge he is not easily excited--which is a great element in an officer--and he has the grit of a bull-dog!  Once let him get his 'teeth' in, and nothing can shake him off." --Abraham Lincoln "We all thought Richmond, protected as it was by our splendid fortifications and defended by our army of veterans, could not be taken.  Yet Grant turned his face to our Capital, and never turned it away until we had surrendered.  Now, I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant's superior as a general.  I doubt that his superior can be found in all history." --Robert E. Lee "He was the steadfast center about and on which everything else turned." --Phil Sheridan "When [Grant] looks at the camera dead-on (the Cold Harbor photograph everyone knows...), there is an unfathomable opacity to him: an impenetrability that almost seems to dare people to impute things to him.... The silent serenity in which Ulysses Grant seemed to move through life, whether the consequence of granitic self-command or physical disposition or long training in hard schools of disappointment, disregard, even failure, puzzled and fascinated his friends.  It has guaranteed this friends and adversaries, contemporaries or members of generations a century later, would fill up the voids with their own imputations of what led and moved him to action."  His common sense, judgment, and intuition bordered on genius, the consequences of which should be judged, Bunting concludes.  "By this criterion the Grant presidency, so far from being one of the nation's worst, may yet be seen as among its best."  --Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant (2004).  [A former army officer, Si Bunting served as superintendent of Virginia Military Institute for eight years.] "Like anyone else, Grant had his strengths and weaknesses, his virtues and his vices; if parts of his character and personality are praiseworthy, one must also concede that he was far from flawless.  In short, he was human....  Grant could be petty, vindictive, stubborn, overly sensitive, and partial to favorites; in dealing with troubling issues he sometimes was too eager to compromise principle in pursuit of pragmatic practice and too willing to accept things as they were.  Yet he also displayed bravery, integrity, determination, persistence, generosity, gentleness, and a self-confidence that if not as unshakable as is commonly portrayed was nevertheless astonishing.  Critics who question his military renown fail to appreciate just how valuable common sense, character, courage, intuition, and the ability to cope with circumstances are to the making of a great commander." --Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity (2000). "Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most complex figures in American history.  He is an enigma, a paradox....  There was something mysterious about him--a deep, primal force that sustained him through defeat and humiliation.  Every setback seemed to enhance his inner strength.  Grant was not brilliant, his appearance was was not striking, his personality did not shine.  He was not visited by the flashes of inspiration that animated Stonewall Jackson.  He did not have Lee's Olympian presence.  His mind lacked the subtleties of Lincoln's thought.  Sometimes he blundered badly; often he oversimplified; yet he saw his goals clearly and moved toward them relentlessly.  The clarity of his conception and the simplicity of his execution imparted a new dimension to military strategy.  Grant ignored Southern cities, rail junctions, and other strategic points and concentrated on destroying the enemy army. [Grant wrote: "The art of war is simple enough.  Find out where your enemy is.  Get at him as soon as you can.  Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on."]  His systematic deployment of overwhelming force not only led to victory in 1865, but established the strategic doctrine that became the basis for American triumphs in two world wars...." --Jean Edward Smith, Grant (2001) "Grant's most striking quality as a general was his broadness of conception and singleness of aim.  He kept one vision before him throughout--that of the slow strangling of the chief Confederate army, to which all resources direct and indirect were to be devoted.  The curious fact that at the eleventh hour he apparently lost patience and struck before Sherman from the south, and Thomas from the southwest, were ready to play their part, is in a sense to his credit: it showed that he had after all an elastic, open and receptive mind and that he was ready to seize an unexpected opportunity that presented itself, even though it meant departing from his carefully prepared programme....  Grant's seven words to Sheridan, "I now feel like ending the matter," can be placed among the most tremendous utterances of military history, ranking with Wellington's apocryphal "Up Guards and at 'em!" and with Caesar's "I have crossed the Rubicon." --Alfred H. Burne, Lee, Grant and Sherman: A Study of Leadership in the 1864-65 Campaign (1938). "[Grant] certainly stood head and shoulders above any of his contemporaries and compatriots, including such able commanders as Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman and Stonewall Jackson.  Grant may not have been gifted with any intuitive genius for warfare; there were no lightning strokes, no brilliant flashes, few daring gambles.  His success as a commander rested on more solid qualities: fixity of purpose, balanced judgment, imperturbable courage and, above all, sturdy common sense.  Grant's military achievements were largely the product of his innate human qualities, his persona, influenced by his experience of life and environmental conditions....  Few of the other leaders of the Civil War could see beyond the range of their immediate battle-front.  Grant's perspective embraced the whole scope of the twin theatres of war, and he was never deflected by purely geographical objectives from his main purpose of destroying the Confederate armies....  Grant has been charged with a callous disregard for human life in pursuing his objectives.  This is hardly a fair criticism, for he was by nature an essentially humane man, and few were more averse from bloodshed than he was." --Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, Grant as Military Commander (1970). "Contrary to the image urged by Grant's detractors, the general's campaign against Lee reveals a warrior every bit as talented as his famous Confederate counterpart.  Grant understood the importance of seizing the initiative and holding tight to his offensive edge to keep Lee off balance and prevent him from going on the offensive.  The very nature of Grant's assignment guaranteed severe casualties.  He made mistakes, many attributable to awkward command relationships with his army.  Sometimes he acted precipitously... other times he moved lethargically, frittering away advantages won by hard fighting and maneuver....  But despite Grant's stumbling, the overall pattern of his warring showed an innovative general attempting to employ combinations of maneuver and force to bring a difficult adversary to bay.  In its larger features, Grant's operations belie his "butcher" caricature.  Judging from Lee's record, the rebel commander should have shared in Grant's "butcher" reputation.  After all, Lee lost more soldiers than any other Civil War general, including Grant, and his casualties in three days at Gettysburg exceeded Union casualties for any three consecutive days under Grant's orders." --Gordon C. Rhea, Cold Harbor (2002). "Of all types of men [Grant] seems to have been the least suited by nature to find his place in this turmoil; for he was a peace-loving man, one who frankly hated war, who was sickened by the sight of bloodshed.... Like many men of a retired nature he required the pressure of necessity to bring out his strength.  He never seems consciously to have realised this; he was so matter-of-fact, not only as regards others but as concerned himself, that when circumstances drew his greatness out into visible manifestations, he appears never to have noticed it... neither carried away by success nor depressed by failure....  In this conflict a close examination will show that whilst Lee fought like a paladin, as a general-in-chief he was inferior to Grant.  Grant maintained his direction by a most careful adjustment, and constant readjustment, between concentration and distribution of force; he never changed his controlling idea, though he frequently modified his means of action.  Lee, I maintain, was an indifferent general-in-chief, not because he failed to win battles, but because his strategy, though it often led to brilliant tactical successes, was not of the type that could win the war.  This, then, is their difference: Grant understood the meaning of grand strategy, Lee did not. --J.F.C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929).  Major-General Fuller, a veteran of World War I and the author many military studies, was considered the Clausewitz of the 20th century. "Historians have often characterized Grant as the unconscious disciple of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, claiming that Grant's overall grasp of strategy exemplified Clausewitz's description of "total war."  The comparison is apt, but not entirely for the right reasons....  Rather, Grant's wartime career embodied Clausewitz's most important maxim: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."  Grant broadened Clausewitz's famed maxim in one crucial respect.  He understood that the cessation of formal hostilities did not by itself mark the realization of the North's war aims.  If the Civil War was politics by other means, then Reconstruction was in some sense a continuation of the struggle to achieve through political means the aims for which the war was fought.... To Grant, warmaking and peacemaking were part of the same larger political act of reuniting the Republic on a lasting basis....  In later years, one of the most popular interpretations of the Grant presidency was that Grant's undoubted skills as a general did not translate into political savvy.  On the level of partisan politics, this was doubtless true....  But, on the level of politics in its larger sense, as policy, such critics overlook the fact that Grant had been practicing politics for years.  From the beginning of the conflict, Grant understood that a civil war was fundamentally different from a war between alien nations.  One had to calibrate operations against the enemy with an eye on the impact of such operations on prospects for peace and reunion....  In 1865, Grant the warmaker became Grant the peacemaker.  But the struggle to subdue the South did not end at Appomattox.  During the next four years, in fact, Grant faced challenges that equaled those he had overcome during the war.... Although Grant continued to hold fast to his ultimate objectives of reunion and racial justice, during the 1870s he realized and reluctantly came to accept the fact that the combination of Southern terrorism, Northern apathy, and constitutional conservatism (exacerbated by an economic depression, divisions within the Republican party, and the emergence of other issues) meant the postponement of racial equality....  By the time he left the White House in 1877, Grant was a disappointed man." --Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace (1991).

[History 269]