OPINION — Editorial

The odyssey of Ulysses

Make room for U.S. Grant among presidential greats

Once upon a time it was a popular if partisan game to rate presidents of the United States on the basis of their greatness or lack of same. Washington and Lincoln could be counted on as the headliners each Presidents' Day while James Buchanan usually brought up the rear, for he did little to save the Union but stand by as it dissolved. Followers of this sport once could count on Ulysses S. Grant's winding up among the bottom-dwellers. But the more one thinks about his life and times and career, the higher he rises. And should.

Think about it: Just a washed-up clerk in his family's foul-smelling tannery in 1859, he would be general-in-chief of all the Union's armies by 1864. Like so many of those who have experienced a meteoric rise in the nation's esteem, he did it not in a flash but by dint of years of preparation and persistence. He would go on to become a much demeaned president of the United States, yet he brought the Union together after Andrew Johnson's presidency had bitterly divided it once again. All those years in obscurity were not wasted; he used them to think, explore and generally to ready himself for the day when the call to duty would arrive. As it did, as surely as destiny itself.

As those of us in Arkansas should well remember, U.S. Grant's visit to this troubled state came in the midst of the Brooks-Baxter War, which he mediated. Even as he protected the right of the newly freed slaves to vote. "Let us have peace," he would proclaim after he and his well-fed and well-supplied forces had defeated Marse Robert's Army of Northern Virginia, perhaps the last stand of chivalry against the mass barbarism to come over the course of a couple of centuries afterward. For the history of modern warfare has followed an all too predictable arc of greater and greater terror--from Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Wilderness to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Our modern Ulysses would give up his military pension in order to run for president of the Union he'd done so much to save. He found himself impoverished in every material way but scarcely in spirit. It seems the law then barred federal officials from accepting military pensions--an oversight that would not be corrected until Harry Truman's presidential years. After he had served as president, U.S. Grant faced financial ruin once again in the wake of the Panic of 1884, but he chose to pay his debtors rather than declare bankruptcy, even if he had to sell off all his military and political memorabilia. Much like Warren G. Harding, another much underestimated president, Mr. Grant would be done in not by his foes in battle but by so-called friends who betrayed his trust.

A literary as well as military and political hero of American history, U.S. Grant would go on to write his memoirs, which a fellow writer named Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, would publish--and the book remains in print to this day. A landmark of American literature, his memoirs remain a national treasure. Who says popular taste can't be trusted? Grant's principal personal concern was, as always, providing for his family, and he was concerned about it even as he lay dying of cancer. Which would prove his final act before the curtain came down on an heroic life.

A biography of our own Ulysses by Jean Edward Smith argues that the key to Grant's life was his persistence, as both his military and political foes would discover: "The common thread is strength of character--an indomitable will that never flagged in the face of adversity... . Sometimes he blundered badly; often he oversimplified; yet he saw his goals clearly and moved toward them relentlessly."

Grant's finest hour on the field of battle might not have been any of his victories in the field but in an hour of defeat as he sat by the campfire after the first day of fighting at Shiloh to review the day's debacle with his faithful lieutenant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who could be pitiless--as the South was to discover. "We've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" General Sherman was supposed to have told him. "Yes," Grant replied, "lick 'em tomorrow, though." And sure enough, he did. How keep a general like that, a man like that, down? Whether in the field or in the presidential ratings.

No wonder Ulysses S. Grant's stature continues to grow--and deserves to. In the end, he was a simple man, as simple as unaltered and unalterable principle. He knew the distinction between tactics and strategy, and though he might suffer many a defeat, he would never be a defeated soul. His principles might be simple, but he stuck to them come what might. Call it faith.

How sum up the man's beliefs? There's no need to, for he summed them up himself. And in the end those beliefs led him to victory not only over his foes but over himself as he finally banished the self-doubt that must have tempted him as it does all of us in the deep night of the soul. They said the U.S. in his name stood for Unconditional Surrender, for that is what he insisted on in battle, as valiant in war as he was generous in peace. His wisdom came leavened with humor, his errors softened by his humility. He leaves us with these few choice quotations among so many:

"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 keep moving on."

"I know only two tunes. One of them is 'Yankee Doodle', and the other one isn't."

"Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace."

Like what you've read here by and about the man? Want to learn more? Or test your stereotype of the man against the latest re-re-evaluation of the man? Then go and study him.

Editorial on 02/21/2017

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