Josiah Bunting III
Ulysses S. Grant.
Times Books (Henry Holt)
166 pages, $20

What are we to make of Ulysses S. Grant? At thirty-nine he
was seen as a wash-out—no job, no money, forced resignation from
the U.S. military after occasional drinking binges, nearly
destitute with a dependent wife and four children, ex-junior
officer, ex-farmer, ex-woodcutter, ex-real-estate agent, and at
last, in 1860, a rumpled leather store clerk in Galena, Illinois.
Historians would be hard pressed to ascertain whether Grant or
Sherman was the greater prewar failure, both meeting nothing but
setbacks almost in direct proportion to the degree that they
continued to exhibit talent, honesty, and hard work. Yet a little
less than three years later by Congressional decree Grant was
appointed Lieutenant-General in command of all Union forces. A
mere seven years after he left Galena, at age forty-six, Grant became
the youngest elected President in the young nation’s history.

If contemporaries were mystified by the sudden ascendancy of
this nondescript Midwesterner without either a distinguished
academic record or friends in high places, 140 years later
historians are still confused in their assessments of how he
pulled it off. Drunk, corrupt, butcher, slob—Grant was slurred
with these epithets and still more, both now and then.

Charitable critics rejoin that Grant alone defeated Lee
and so won the Civil War, tried to help Blacks and Indians, did
not really profit from the rampant graft in his midst, and wrote
memoirs that impressed the literati by their style and candor.
Recent academic biographers are amused by Grant’s clumsy
ascendance into the nouveau-riche world of the Gilded Age, and how
out of place this lucky bumpkin was amid sophisticated society
here and abroad. Yet both detractors and admirers agree that he
was otherwise in the right place at the right time, an ex-officer
in need of work when what was left of the United States suddenly
needed thousands of military men of any background, age, and
ability—with a premium on any who had graduated from West Point
(even if he might have finished twenty-first in a class of
thirty-nine).

Josiah Bunting III in his new engaging biography—written for
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “The American Presidents” series—rejects
much of such conventional wisdom, both pro and con, in making the
case that Grant’s rise was both logical and understandable, given
his innate talents and proven discipline.
Indeed, to Bunting, his
accomplishments are so legion as a great captain, a two-term
president, an astute protector of Blacks and Indians, a man of humble and
generous temperament, and a masterful writer that we need to
reassess all the old appellations like “average,” or “mediocre,”

and instead appreciate Grant as the truly great man he was.

In his revisionist efforts Bunting—himself a combat
veteran, officer, and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia
Military Institute—looks at a variety of criteria often ignored
by the professors and journalists who so often write our biographies.
Military leadership is not an easy thing in itself, but Grant was
more than either a supreme commander or combat leader, but rather
both and still more. He was a Patton and an Eisenhower all in one,
stalking the front lines under fire and issuing his famous crisp,
laconic orders to division commanders, even while as a grand military
vizier he telegraphed orders over a continent-sized theater to
Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan confronting Confederate forces
nearly two thousand miles distant.

As far as innate intelligence goes, very early on, Grant proved to be
a gifted student of engineering. Despite his so-so aggregate
record at West Point, a few thought he could have eventually
become a professor of mathematics. Surely his later grasp of
logistics reflects both a quick mind and West Point training. He
may have been the best horseman in the U.S. army office corps.
Bunting compares his unique equestrian talent to
“horse-whispering,” an almost uncanny understanding of the
effects of noise, hearing, and emotions upon animals, an extra
sense that would serve him equally well with people.

Bunting also reminds us that the shy and nondescript
Lieutenant Grant was often courageous in the Mexican War (which
he later condemned as “one of the most unjust wars ever waged by
a stronger nation against a weaker one”), as evidenced by
hair-raising but little discussed exploits where his imagination
and horse-mastery saved his life. And by the time Grant was
drilling the Illinois state militia—after a series of
embarrassing job rebuffs from well-entrenched mediocrities in the
War Department—he was probably the most capable young officer in
the North.

So how did Grant accept the fact that despite his wide travel, education,
combat experience, and job history at almost forty he had earned
little more than scorn and rumor? Bunting implies that for all
his insecurities, there was a certain serenity in Grant, a sort
of philosophical acceptance that merit was often trumped by fate
and luck: do your best and hope your excellence is recognized,
although there is a good chance that it might not be.

What made him a great general? The campaigns to take Forts
Henry and Donelson were inspired; the capture of Vicksburg was
beyond the powers of any contemporary Northern general save
Grant. But it was not just know-how that made Grant singular. As
Bunting rightly notes, “Grant understood that his predecessors in
command in the East had failed not because of inferior tactical
brains but because they lacked, simply, will.” And he adds of
Grant’s bulldog tenacity—quoting Thucydides—that “quiet obduracy
in a leader is equally formidable.”

All his predecessor supreme commanders that tried to crash the
Army of the Potomac on through to Richmond—Irwin McDowell, George
McClellan (in two terms), John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph
Hooker—were sickened at the ensuing terrible arithmetic of
thousands of combat dead. None quite understood that the tragic
price of victory in the new industrial-age
war was often
unprecedented casualties (“not war, but murder” an officer
remarked of Cold Harbor), nor that the purpose of the Union army
was not necessarily the possession of enemy territory or even the
capture of Richmond, but the destruction of the Army of Northern
Virginia.

This was a frightening task that would require backbone when
reports flooded in about what Lee’s sharpshooters could do to
thousands charging fixed positions. In the face of it all, Grant
reiterated, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes
all summer” and “there will be no turning back”—the first general
to take to heart Lincoln’s continual harangue about Lee that
“Wherever the enemy goes, let our troops go also.”

Bunting cites, but perhaps does not quite give full credit to,
Grant’s rare military superior and subordinate, Lincoln and
Sherman. Both in some ways made him what he was. Lincoln gave him
complete trust, and more importantly a preexisting strategic
blueprint of Winfield Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan that
directed Union forces to blockade the Southern coast and squeeze
the Confederacy from the west, north, south as well as Grant’s
east. Sherman may have sounded wild and crazy, but he too was an
authentic American genius the likes of which this country has
rarely seen since. If Grant chewed up Lee, Sherman rampaged
through the very heart of the enemy’s heartland, thus eroding the
enemy’s economic, social, and psychological ability to resist.
And just as Sherman could march 600 miles freely because Grant
stuck to Lee, so Grant could cling to Lee’s shrinking army
because the latter’s entire country was falling apart to his
rear.

The first Grant presidential term was relatively successful.
Southerners remembered Appomattox and realized that a moderate
Midwesterner who was magnanimous to the defeated was about the
best that they could hope for after the unbalanced Andrew
Johnson, who hated Secessionists as much as he did new Black
citizens. Radicals in turn saw Grant as a sort of proto-Wesley
Clark, the liberal’s tool whose war record and reputation for
no-nonsense command might provide cover and then force for their
own revolutionary ideas about punishing and reconstituting the
South.

When Grant took office he ran the country like he did the Army of
the Potomac, delegating authority with the expectation that
subordinates would not be heard from again since they would
obviously take the initiative and need little further guidance.
But unfortunately the county was in the greatest cycle of
economic, cultural—and ethical—transformation in its history.
The Industrial Revolution created wealth as never before, and
with it an ancillary cargo of inflated bonds, stocks, and shaky
credit—all enormously lucrative and completely unregulated.

Grant agonized over how to save
the achievement of the Civil War and thus ensure freedom to
Blacks—when protecting civil rights required millions
of dollars and thousands of Federal troops to keep
vigilantes and ex-Klansmen from lynching freedmen and
terrorizing Republican judges. As his administration wore
on, as recession demanded budget cuts, as the country came
both to fear the idea of real racial equality and to lament
the past horrendous damage wrought on the South, Grant
almost alone still insisted on protecting Lincoln’s
idea of a free and equal Negro populace. Bunting argues,
reminiscent of Frederick Douglass, that Grant may well have
been the best friend that American Blacks ever had. Had he
been nominated for a third term in 1876 or even in 1880, he
might well have seen Reconstruction through and thus avoided
the rendezvous a century later with the messy effort to end
Jim Crow.

As for the terrible scandals—the Credit Mobile, the Sanborn
Contracts, the Back Pay Grab, the Indian Trading Scandal, and the
Whiskey ring—they finally did Grant the politician in, rapidly
eroding all the political capital so incrementally gained from
Vicksburg to Appomattox. Bunting notes that Grant was probably
neither enriched by nor involved in the malfeasance. But he gives
Grant no pass, lamenting that the modesty and diffidence toward
detail and acrimony that were his trademarks on the battlefield
were near fatal characteristics as president in such an age—a
truly heroic man on a horse who nonetheless behind the desk

“could not say no to a friend, and not even to a very good friend
at that.”

We assume that thousands of stinky cigars caused the throat
cancer that felled Grant. Perhaps. But what really killed
him at sixty-three was the sudden loss, the year before, of all his
hard-earned fortune, through the dishonesty and/or incompetence
of his partners (and son)—and his own reoccurring naiveté that
this last time really did catch up with him. At sixty-two Ulysses S.
Grant was once more flat broke, and reduced to writing Civil War
essays (sometimes nit-picked by demanding editors) for $500.

He had come full circle, but just as he kept at it selling
leather in Galena, so too now he ignored the disgrace and
poverty, and pressed on to write his way back to praise and
security. Bunting, the novelist and veteran, warms to the
often-told saga of Grant’s last heroic struggle to finish his
vast 275,000 word memoir and—thanks to Mark
Twain, his
publisher—leave his family secure in his death in a way
he could not in life.

This is a wonderful account about a quintessential but singular
American. Some of us might have been more critical of Grant’s
brand of war as annihilation and still more impressed by the
counter-strategy of attrition embraced by William Tecumseh
Sherman. More could be said of Grant’s continual Clintonian
weakness of being awed and impressed by empty celebrities, the
talentless rich, and petty Whitewater-like crooks. That being
said, Bunting is surely right that without Grant, the Civil War
could not have been won in four years—or perhaps won at all, with
an unconditional surrender and the abrupt elimination of chattel
slavery.

The 60,000-word biography of American presidents, world
conquerors, and classic authors—without footnotes—is the latest
hot literary genre, as both the present anthology and the
celebrity-written Penguin series suggest. I have read many of
them. None are more engagingly written or more attuned to clarity of
thought and expression than Josiah Bunting’s. Grant, the stylist,
would have approved.