From the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln five days later, and until his own death in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant was first in the hearts of his countrymen. They saluted him as a savior of the Union. He was the most famous and most carefully scrutinized American. Elected president by a modest majority in 1868, he was reelected four years later by an overwhelming majority; and although his second term was full of contention, disappointment, and "scandal," he retained a certain hold on citizens' affections and the full measure of their gratitude -- a gratitude that largely transcended their political judgment of his service. His decision not to seek a third term in 1876 was seen as honorable and forbearing. After fifteen years' service as general and president, he had earned his rest.

Grant's conduct as an ex-president (during the presidencies of Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Chester Alan Arthur) served to make him more popular; he was beloved. His heroic fight against a terrible cancer, the continuing magnanimity of his judgments about men formerly his enemies, his survival with grace through a financial ruin not of his own making -- such things commended him to all. His funeral in New York City, in which southern contingents marched proudly near the front of the procession, was an occasion for an overwhelming outpouring of public gratitude, mourning, affection. A giant had left the country, and the nation knew it.

For most of the time of his public florescence (1862-85), however, no one really knew quite what to make of Ulysses S. Grant. He was a profound puzzle to his own generation; the character of his gifts resisted and frustrated their powers of analysis; his taciturnity (taciturn and imperturbable are among the most common adjectives in the lexicon of Grant commentary) denied them his own views and justifications for what he had done. Grant was rarely an explainer or justifier. In politics as in war, he addressed his problems, discharged his mission, and moved on. Like the Julius Caesar of the war commentaries (to which Grant's own Memoirs would be compared), he moved irresistibly forward: "These things having been accomplished, next Caesar turned his attention to . . ." Grant was, of course, a writer of famously pellucid military orders, and he was a man capable of an almost inhuman disinterestedness in reaching judgments about strategy: he saw things bluntly and directly. Of his possession of that rare combination of those qualities of character and mind that make for a great commander, there is and was no question. But the nature of that combination seems to have eluded people of his own time who tried to explain it, just as it has, until fairly recently, eluded biographers and historians who have tried (as each generation must) to explain him.

There are several related issues. Grant was the only American president to serve two complete and consecutive terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, and as president he was bequeathed heavier and less tractable burdens than any other president in our history, save only two. The transformation of Great Commander into President/Politician has been as difficult for historians to grasp as it must surely have been for the subject of their studies -- although Grant never let on that he gave it much thought. He has been an enigma not only to Grant biographers but also to generations of historical generalists and scholars, their difficulty in assessment betrayed by their inability to write about him with anything approaching the objectivity and disinterestedness he both prized and represented. Of no president are biases in judgment less well disguised than in those that inform opinions about Ulysses Grant. There is much acidulous curling of the lip in depictions and opinions and judgments about him, an irremediable condescension stamped, it sometimes seems, on every page -- even in the tartly acute, often fanny chapters of the only single-volume major history of the Grant presidency: William Hesseltine's Ulysses Grant, now sixty-nine years old.

It is as though these writers can no more escape the clichés of the Grant Myth than the popular culture can, the popular culture in which he lives on as a shadowed icon, great but not good, above all opaque; even when he looks at the camera dead-on (the Cold Harbor photograph everyone knows, the one in front of the tent), there is an unfathomable opacity to him: an impenetrability that almost seems to dare people to impute things to him. He won us the war; he helped save the Plains Indians; he was the steady if tormented guarantor of Reconstruction (at least while he was president the black people had a chance); he evinced calm bravery in vetoing the inflation bill of 1874 (in the face of overwhelming political pressure to the contrary) -- these are remarkable things he did. But the counts against him remain, sullen and immovable: drunk, butcher, scandal-monger. A crude sort of man, perhaps of the type we need to run a war, and, sometimes, to run the country, but these things do not entitle him to fair assessment, not with other things we know.

Under these vaguely recollected facts float a few others in mitigation: Wasn't he kind to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox (even though he wore a soiled uniform)? Didn't he write a great book, some kind of memoir, something to do with Mark Twain, that made his family enough money to live on, after he had died from cancer, up in the Adirondacks? The anecdotes that sustain these cameos seem preserved under a dusty lacquer: wasn't it Lincoln who said something about getting the other generals some of Grant's brand of whiskey, so that they too could win battles instead of talking about what they needed to win battles?

And didn't his huge battered columns, taking a sharp turn to the south in the Virginia Wilderness, after taking unspeakable losses, didn't they cheer in flat-out amazement that their chief was pushing them toward, not away from, the enemy who had whipped every other Yankee bandbox general sent after them? This was in the spring of 1864, when the word butcher began to be heard, when General Grant promised "to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." The crude silent soldier who sat whittling in a clearing while reports of desperate casualties flowed in like a bloody tide. And, finally, for the minority of Americans who even remember that Ulysses Grant was president as well as general, did he not (in a phrase so worn it might almost be the start of an epithet) preside over the most corrupt administration in American history? This is why he must be last in all the rankings . . . et cetera.

Ulysses Grant has not been the kind of historical personage whom people who write history are likely to view with unprejudiced eyes. And there is another family of Grant anecdotes, received information, which present him as permanently in rebellion against, precisely, those things that historians (intellectuals, educated in the humane letters, reluctant to praise military men other than George C. Marshall or Colin Powell) believe or want to believe; after all, is not history written in order to equip rising generations with the knowledge, the "diagnostic ability," that will serve to immunize them against making the mistakes earlier generations have made? Invariably they take Grant to be anti-intellectual; pre-intellectual, Henry Adams would say -- the same Henry Adams who wrote that to evolve from Alexander the Great to George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant was to disprove Darwin. They have tended to come at him with that bias. They, too, vaguely recollect Grant's comment about Venice: a nice city, if they'd drain the streets; and when you get him to Rome, take him to see the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius: he'll like the horse.

A clue to the Problem of Grant -- the problem being that he has only rarely, and only recently, been fairly judged as President, not
General, Grant -- lies in the title of John Russell Young's wonderful portrait of the ex-president, Around the World with General Grant. Young was a New York Herald writer assigned to accompany the Grants on their trip around the world -- a journey that would last two years and four months -- and to file stories about their visits and meetings and expeditions abroad. When the party left Philadelphia in May 1877 (Young not yet with them), Grant's friend and confidant William Tecumseh Sherman offered the farewell toast. He reminded the guests that the man to whom they were saying goodbye was not President Grant but General Grant -- the General Grant who, in the darkest days of the war, at Fort Donelson, had gained for the Union its first serious victory and brought it off in the finest style, telling his opponent (as it happened, a dear and lifelong friend): "No terms except complete and unconditional surrender can be accepted. I propose to move upon your works."

All during the long journey, wherever he was received, however carefully protocol labored to receive him as a "former sovereign," however exalted his former station, it was as General Grant that he was greeted and honored.

This is still how Grant is remembered: as a general, not a president, and it explains in part the condescension -- there is no better word for it -- with which pundits and historians have tended to write of him. There may be strength in his soul, but no fineness in it, no grace; little culture, small learning (none of it used to advantage in the regular uses of political intercourse), meager evidence of the capacity to learn and to reflect; no felt obligation to explain himself; no evidence of self-doubt. Generations of Grant scholars, too, have brought to their consideration of his presidency -- of his whole career -- the absorbing interests of their own times. By the turn of the century, and for the next fifty years, an unconscious racism inflected their judgments: black Americans, recently made free, had nothing of the training or predisposition (i.e., capacity) to undertake to govern themselves; Reconstruction, under Grant, was misjudged; and with Hayes came peace, in 1877, because Hayes understood that the states themselves could best deal with their -- colored -- problems. Grant, fully in the camp of the radical Republicans by the time he took office as president, ready to enforce bayonet rule by federal troops to "put down" troubles, was culpable in the execution of a vast misunderstanding of what was really needed in the South.

The Great War, 1914-18, and the slaughter that distinguished this most colossal barbarism in the history of the world, and the campaigns and battles on the western front, brought Grant the Butcher to the fore again: it forced consideration less of the achievements and terms of Appomattox than of the sixty-five thousand casualties in five weeks' fighting in the spring of 1864 -- in Virginia alone. And in the aftermath of the Harding presidency the scandals of Grant's own administration exerted a renewed fascination.

Historians writing in more recent years -- Brooks Simpson, Jean Edward Smith, Frank Scaturro -- have reversed the trend and tendency. They are getting beyond and beneath the clichés, and what Scaturro calls "literary" prejudices, the ungovernable indulgence in a weird kind of class depredation: the distaste of the well bred and educated for the provincial and, somehow, crude Ulysses. Above all they are reminding our contemporaries and a rising generation of the nature of the mission, and its monumental challenge, to which Grant, elected in 1868, was then committed. Simpson quotes a contemporary Edinburgh Review assessment: "To bind up the wounds left by the war, to restore concord to the still distracted Union, to ensure real freedom to the Southern Negro, and full justice to the southern white; these are indeed tasks which might tax the powers of Washington himself or a greater than Washington, if such a man is to be found."

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 his friends and adversaries, contemporaries or members of generations a century later, would fill up the voids with their own amputations of what led and moved him to action. Sigmund Freud crated one of his teachers with a degree of simple common sense so great that it must be said to border on genius; common sense, judgment, intuition -- such things cannot always be dissected. Instead, their consequences should be judged. By this criterion the Grant presidency, so far from being one of the nation's worst, may yet be seen as among its best.

He does remain a mystery, and that is the Problem of Grant. Children say much more than they know when they idly ask: Who is buried in Grant's tomb?

Copyright © 2004 by Josiah Bunting III