WARRIOR ADRIFT
McFeely, William S.
WARRIOR ADRIFT GRANT: A BIOGRAPHY by William S. McFeely W.W. Norton. 591 pp. $19.95. Although he was one of the country's greatest military warriors, Ulysses S. Grant has never occupied an...
...It was part of Grant's genius that he recognized this truth and did not flinch from pursuing it...
...Failure did not elude Grant...
...The result is a stunning achievement...
...It seems emblematic of his life that he is buried in ground that he never set foot on, remaining homeless even in death...
...He wrote the orders himself," McFeely notes, and with a clarity and effortlessness that suggests total absorption and engagement...
...But not Grant...
...There was a pathos about Grant that makes him appealing yet unattractive...
...He is one of the great captains of modern warfare...
...Although he was one of the country's greatest military warriors, Ulysses S. Grant has never occupied an enviable place in the nation's memory...
...McFeely readily concedes that Grant had "no organic, artistic, or intellectual special-ness," and that he was but an ordinary person who wanted desperately to escape his ordinariness and feared failure, obscurity, and poverty...
...So would many of his aspiring but less successful contemporaries...
...What McFeely does instead is to make comprehensible the failures and moral delinquencies of Grant's White House years: the twin betrayals of the freed slaves and the Indians, the corruption in his official and private families, the vacillation and drift of his policy...
...He failed at farming and rent collecting in Missouri, was forced at one time to peddle firewood on street corners in St...
...He saw it all...
...He tried to assuage his insecurities in ways that sullied his reputation...
...A successful man who feared failure, a loner who dreaded loneliness, an ordinary man who despised ordinariness, Grant seems to have drifted through life without purpose save when he was making war and making books...
...Grant's life, probably even more so than Lincoln's, is the archetypical American success story of the mid-Nineteenth Century...
...He protected aides from prosecution, even at the risk of perjuring himself, because their misdeeds raised questions about his competence...
...But not until this new biography by William S. McFeely has the entirety of Grant's career been treated with the sympathetic understanding that it merits...
...Some years ago the late Bruce Catton rescued Grant's military reputation from unfair aspersions...
...McFeely's deeply sensitive biography is a striking portrait not only of a man but of the nation that his military exploits helped to preserve...
...And he identified with the wealthy because their material success represented the thing that he had failed to achieve...
...Grant would look just right on the fifty-dollar bill," McFeely quips...
...He became President because he wanted to be reassured of the public's confidence in him...
...Steadily this insecure man grew in self-confidence and singlemindedness...
...He had a gift for writing books...
...Following a triumphal world tour after he left the Presidency, he invested heavily in his son's stock brokerage business, lost his shirt when the firm's unethical transactions caught up with it, and had to borrow money from William Henry Vanderbilt...
...Grant is not one of our great Presidents, and McFeely is too honest a biographer to claim a higher place for him in the historical ratings...
...The algebra was simple: Keep the pressure up until the enemy's resources, physical, human, and moral, were completely exhausted...
...The more numerous North would win the body count victory, and so it did...
...Lawrence N. Powell (Lawrence N. Powell is an associate professor of history at Tulane University...
...And ever since his Presidency, the term "Grantism" has been synonymous with political corruption and cronyism...
...Civilian life brought no appreciable movement in his fortunes...
...Despite his squeamishness about blood (his steaks had to be charbroiled before he could eat them), he applied the logic of total war, of war of annihilation, with grim determination...
...All three conditions had been tangible realities to him...
...As a peacetime officer stationed on the Pacific Coast, Grant squandered his savings in bootless side investments, took to drink, and finally left the service in 1854...
...The portrait is not always flattering, either to man or to nation, but it is compelling and illuminating...
...Grant's problem was that he could find nothing he felt worth doing in prewar America, nothing that fully engaged his limited but special talents...
...The new, modern war of stupefying carnage shook the nerve of several Civil War generals...
...Grant: A Biography is of prize-winning quality, a moving and sensitive portrayal of a man and his times...
...Grant might have died in disgrace and genteel poverty had he not discovered one other thing that could engage him as much as war...
...Grant, written while he was dying of throat cancer, was a literary and financial success...
...Generations of Americans, justifiably repulsed by the slaughter at Cold Harbor, have known him only as "butcher Grant" because of the terrifyingly high casualty rates he was willing to incur during the Wilderness campaign...
...His mind came to grasp the whole of the war as it flowed and evolved before him...
...He comes to us now almost as a waif...
...Louis, and by 1860 he had to seek employment in his father's leather business in Galena, Illinois...
...His two-volume Personal Memoirs of U.S...
...And then the Civil War came and, as McFeely makes clear, brought "some essential part of his being" into play as few other things could...
...The explanations for these shortcomings are several and various, but always they seem to come back to Grant's character itself...
...Having finally made it in a big way and received the adulation that he desperately craved, Grant nonetheless continued to be haunted by the worry that he might fail again and return to the obscurity from which he had suddenly and spectacularly emerged...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
