Silent "Sam" Grant

...they denied that it was a legitimate and enforceable goal of political February 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...

...Lee parried Grant for a year and inflicted such casual-ties on the Federals that Northern newspaper-readers were drained of any enthusiasm for the hard-slogging campaign and the long siege of Petersburg...

...I wish to say a word further...

...a cause he had not made his own without the searching of a patriot's soul...

...For the voters who elected him president—and for the president who elevated him to command the Union armies—Grant's greatest quality was that he was a winner...

...He was the silent American hero: a man who does rather than talks...

...After the war, Lee never allowed any-one in his presence to speak ill of General Grant...

...the prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey...

...He was a paragon of modest stillness, forbearance, and humility, and in his person incarnated the virtues of Washington, indeed of Marcus Aurelius...

...That was Grant's way...

...Both men were exemplars of Christian humility...

...But his insistence on equal rights for blacks also alienated those in North and South who thought political and civil equality for the Negro was a mere rhetorical sop for idealists...

...A casual compilation of adjectives describing Grant's appearance provides evidence of a plebeian character: slouching, rumpled, stooped: sloppy, stubby, grubby, slovenly, dusty, shuffling—all the superficial indicia of what a contemporary called a pachydermism—exactly the kind of character, ruthless and unfeeling, that it must have taken to subdue Lee...

...BUNTING SEES GRANT'S MASK OF COMMAND as both a virtue and a liability...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W The usual comparison is between Grant and Lee...

...If Grant gave him-self uncalculatedly to his work, so too was this a prime attribute of Lee's...

...But few mark his presidency as a success...

...All are available in paperback 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR February 2005 To this letter from his commander-in-chief, the president of the United States, General Grant made no reply...

...When you finally got below, and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen...

...And he was the one Union general that Lee could not evict from Virginia...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W Silent "Sam" Grant Ulysses S. Grant By Josiah Bunting III (Imes Books, 180 pages, $20 ) Reviewed by H. W. Crocker III N 13 hh,y 1863, President Abraham Lincoln wrote this remarkable letter to "My Dear General," Ulysses S. Grant: I do not remember that you and I ever met personally...

...It helped establish his reputation for coolness under fire, but it also served to buttress the arguments of his critics: that he was unfeeling, morally obtuse, an insensate butcher...

...Praise, blame, reward, and any other considerations were superfluous, dismissed immediately, if recognized at all, in the single-minded pursuit of his objective...

...Grant's best friends at West Point—and throughout his life—were Southerners and Midwesterners...

...He did the best he could to achieve these aims...

...This was no source of comfort to such as HenryAdams, who wrote that to trace a line from Alexander the Great to George Washington to Grant was to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution...

...But what the standard comparison misses is how similar in other ways Grant and Lee were...

...For Grant, taciturn, imperturbable, undemonstrative, what mattered was executing the job before him—winning battles and winning the war...

...One of Grant's own staff officers at Appomattox said that Grant was "covered with mud and in an old faded uniform, looking like a fly on the shoulder of beef" And another regretted that the war had not been "closed with such a battle as Gettysburg...

...As such Grant epitomizes a certain sort of American hero—an archetype of American Democratic man just as much as Robert E. Lee is an archetype of a gallant, lost, aristocratic Virginia...

...Bunting erases the caricature...

...I nowwish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right, and I was wrong...

...When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did—march the troops across the neck—run the batteries with the trans-ports, and thus go below...

...Like most military men turned politicians, Bunting observes, Grant was a "closet moderate...

...One can easily imagine the scene: Grant, reading the letter, folding it into his pocket, shifting his stogie from the right side to the left side of his mouth, and then putting the president's letter out of his mind, sitting down on a tree stump, taking a stick and a pocket knife, and whittling while thinking about his next plan of attack...

...H. W Crocker III is the author of Robert E. Lee on Leadership...

...That moderation distanced him from the Radical Republicans...

...I write this now as grateful acknowledgement for the almost inestimable service you have done the country...

...Like most Northerners, Grant began the War Between the States caring far less about slavery than he did about preserving the Union...

...As for Grant, Lee's very virtues "implied the less attractive quality of his opponent...

...Banks, and when you turned Northward East of Big Black, I feared it was a mistake...

...When Lee wrote about abolitionist New Englanders with rare sarcasm—"Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others"—he wrote of a regional elite with whom Grant always felt uneasy as well...

...As president, Grant's highest purpose was to honor the cause for which his men had died...

...He conducted a masterful campaign at Vicksburg...

...and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition, and the like, would succeed...

...and Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church...

...But Grant's dogged pursuit had its reward: he finally cornered the Grey Fox and ended the Confederacy's only hope...

...Both generals were veterans of the Mexican War...

...Bunting encapsulates the standard portraits: "Lee's reputation is as a tactical genius, always making do with less...

...Yours very truly, Abraham Lincoln...

...And when the two men met at Appomattox, they emerged from the encounter with such fellow feeling that their meeting set the stage for the reconciliation of North and South...

...and in addressing Grant's much-maligned presidency, he discerns that as in war so in peace, Grant set himself one overriding goal, a goal that justifies a word that is rarely applied to Grant: the word is "noble...

...He brought Lincoln victory in the West, when other generals were timorous...

...Grant was a master strategist, Lee a master tactician...

...But as the war developed, so too did Grant's sense that abolishing slavery would be the war's second—and necessary—great accomplishment...

...Thus his plat-form: to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to protect the freedmen, to maintain unity within the Republican Party, and to conciliate the South...

...The first sentence of Grant's memoirs reads: "My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral...

...He was—notes Josiah Bunting, former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute and author of this incisive new volume on Grant, an installment in the "American Presidents Series" edited by Arthur Schlesinger—the sort of man who gives himself "uncalculatedly to the work...

...After three years of battles in the War Between the States, they were the notable victors: the two great generals who at last had to confront each other...

...Both men were West Pointers...

...As it is, the rebellion has been more worn out than suppressed...

...Beyond this he was seen, in both North and South, as an embodiment of nobility, as humbly allegiant to a cause...