It was the night of the Presidential election of 1876. After eight hard but relatively successful years in the White House, Ulysses S. Grant was listening to couriers bringing in the news. The election was going bad.
The Democrat, Samuel Tilden, was headed toward a sweeping victory. Tilden was a northern man, but how much would he bend to the Southern racists who controlled his party? They had fought first President Lincoln and then President Grant every step of the way. And now those same Democrats had the Presidency and control of the House of Representatives. All the progress of the last sixteen years could be rolled back or just plain undone. The war, the hundreds of thousands of dead, Lincoln’s murder—would it all be for nothing?
Grant treated the news of the election as he did all information: He considered it for a few long moments, puffing on his constant cigar. The former general was a quiet man. When he finally spoke, his words, like his prose, were curt, spare and precise, “Gentlemen, it looks to me as if Tilden is elected.”
What happened next was a political robbery of HBO proportions. Tilden had won 17 states, for a total of 184 electoral votes, one vote shy of the 185 needed, and he was leading the popular vote by a quarter of a million. The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, had also won 17 slightly smaller states for a total of 165 electoral votes. The 4 remaining states were impossible to call, their totals contested because of widespread voter fraud and intimidation. Eventually a congressional commission was assembled to resolve the hung election. Fifteen men voted down party lines to give all disputed states to Hayes. The presidency was saved from the party of secession, but the Democrats weren’t going to give in without getting something back. The compromise that gave Hayes the presidency would all but undo Grant and Lincoln’s post-war policies in the south. It didn’t exactly reinstate slavery, but it was pretty damn close.
Americans always seem to think they live in exceptional times. We are made to believe each election is the most important in the history of our country. But if that was ever true, it was in the era of the Civil War. If the Union had lost, what would we be today? Only in hindsight did the war really end with the fall of Richmond. At the time, the resolution felt unsure, even more so after the turbulent three year presidency of Andrew Johnson. It is because of Grant that we look back on that time as the beginning of post-war America and not the continuation of an inevitable dissolve. Though the ideas and the spirit and personality of Lincoln dominate the Civil War itself, Grant is the hero of the wider era, the man most responsible for winning the war and then holding the peace. Yet thanks to a half-century of abuse at the hands of lost cause historians, Americans came to know Grant the butcher, Grant the drunk, Grant the impossibly corrupt president.
Ronald C. White’s American Ulysses is the latest in a host of recent Grant books slowly but surely rebuilding the reputation of our most unfairly maligned historical figure. Not only did Grant win the Civil War, he was the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve two full consecutive terms, and he wrote one of the greatest memoirs in American letters.
The complexity of Grant’s character first emerged as a young soldier in the Mexican American War. In Mexico, Grant was something of an action hero: riding full gallop through the streets of Monterey, bullets skimming the air, breaking down the door of a church to haul a cannon to the steeple and turn the tide of a battle. First in the northern theater under Zachary Taylor and then throughout Winfield Scott’s Cortez march to Mexico City, Grant was there for it all. Despite his successes as a battlefield officer and quartermaster, Grant grew cynical about the Mexican War. He saw it for what it was: a powerful country taking land from a weaker one.
White is most fresh and effective when he is shifting the focus from Grant’s stellar resume to his indomitable character. In American Ulysses, the things Grant did are less compelling than the manner in which he did them: calmly, quietly, with shame only for himself and none for others. White’s Grant is a man who could coolly smoke during the fiercest battle, stand emotionless in a field covered with men dead at his command, and yet be unable to control his temper should he see a horse abused; a man who could sit on a riverbank after his worst defeat of the Civil War and say with a smile, “we’ll lick ’em tomorrow,” and then get up and do it. Grant’s ability to communicate clearly, to move an army, to execute long-term goals, to harness the true potential of the soldiers under him, was masterful. It’s not that Robert E. Lee was a slouch, but he was merely Grant’s latest systematic disassembling of an opponent. On the day of Lee’s surrender, the gallant southern gentleman is waiting in all his pomp, and in strolls Grant in a mud-splattered private’s coat and the same pants he’s had on for three days straight. Oh, to see the look of defeat on that old slave master’s face.
White’s case for Grant as a general and a man is solid; his case for Grant as a president is less so—not because the case is poorly made, but simply because the record of Grant’s two terms is more uneven. President Grant held the country together in one of its most fragile times, busted the KKK, staved off one financial crisis but could not avoid another—our worst until the Great Depression. Despite his own incorruptibility, by the end of his eight years in office, several of Grant’s cabinet members were in prison, and his personal finances were a mess of shadows and half-assed deals.
The United States presidency is perhaps the most difficult of jobs to fairly evaluate. It has become near impossible to judge these leaders apart from our own inclinations, loyalties, and understandings. A clear view is something only centuries can provide. Ulysses Grant was immense popularity at his death, but his reputation has gone through a long purgatory as one of our “worst presidents” and “most over-rated generals.” Now, 150 years after his first election, Grant is finally getting his due, alongside Lincoln and Washington, as one of the few truly indispensible figures in America’s history.
