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Ulysses S. Grant Brief History of the Image of a Hero: 1822-1885 by Elizabeth D

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Ulysses S. Grant Brief History of the Image of a Hero: 1822-1885 by Elizabeth D VITA Ulysses S. Grant Brief history of the image of a hero: 1822-1885 by elizabeth d. samet y late 1863, most of the major Civil War battles in the West— tenance generals who had commanded the Army of the Potomac in Shiloh, Stones River, Port Hudson, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the East since 1861. In March 1864, the rank of lieutenant general (last BChattanooga—had been fought. Union forces had the upper held by George Washington) having been revived for the purpose, a hand. Much of the credit for the success went to Major General newly promoted Grant assumed command of all Union armies. Ulysses S. Grant, whose aggressiveness especially appealed to Presi- In December, Grant had summoned senior officers to Nashville to dent Lincoln, long frustrated by the cavalcade of hesitant, high-main- discuss the winter campaign. One night, at the suggestion of William T. Sherman, they went to see Hamlet. The mood was raucous from the start, the audience full of soldiers on their way to or from leave. The officers were sitting incognito in the balcony when, according to one, Sherman started complaining loudly that the actors were butchering the play. When Hamlet picked up Yorick’s skull, a soldier at the back bellowed, “Say pard, what is it, Yank or Reb?” The audience erupted, and Grant said, “We had better get out of here.” The anecdote nicely illustrates the difference between the excit- able, voluble Sherman and the calm, unobtrusive Grant. It is also deeply suggestive. Contemplating human remains was nothing alien to that audience. The skull prompts Hamlet’s unflinching medita- tion on the fate of even the greatest heroes: Alexander’s dust might seal a beer barrel, while Caesar’s clay “Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” In the Norwegian Fortinbras, willing to bury 20,000 soldiers to secure a worthless piece of land, Hamlet sees a puffed- up prince hungry for martial honor. Causes, for Hamlet, are never ancillary: with his dying breaths he commands Horatio, “report ADOLPH G. METZNER/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS me and my cause aright.” CAL VORNBERGER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO 42 January - February 2019 The views expressed in this Vita do not reflect the official position or policy of the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, or the U.S. Government. Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Grant, like Hamlet a care- ful parser of causes, readily distinguishes in his Personal Memoirs, finished days be- fore his death from cancer, between the cynical politi- cal motives that sparked the Mexican War and the just principles that animated de- fense of the Union. He states unequivocally in his conclu- sion: “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.” Its perpetuation was “one of the worst [causes] for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Terse, cool, free of melo- drama, Grant’s book is an anomaly among the era’s many Civil War memoirs. To a perhaps surprising de- gree, Grant shared Hamlet’s mistrust of a particular kind THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART/PUBLIC DOMAIN of martial honor. Although he Views of Grant (from far left): war - possessed physical courage time sketch credited to German immigrant and Union Army captain and recognized it in others, Adolph G. Metzner; his tomb, in he prized “moral courage” New York City; an 1888 collectible above all. He was suspicious from the “Great Generals” series; of braggarts, “men who were and a formal wartime portrait always aching for a fight when there was no enemy near,” and self- deprecating. Yet even as he finished his memoir, its story was being eclipsed, just as Hamlet’s doubts are drowned out by Fortinbras, who arrives to take over Denmark and bury its prince with a wildly ism in 1886, Matthew Arnold described him as “free from show, pa- inappropriate soldier’s funeral. The revisionist Civil War narrative— rade, and pomposity; sensible and sagacious; scanning closely the glorifying the Lost Cause through song and story, textbooks and situation, seeing things as they actually were…never flurried, never statuary; cloaking with chivalric ritual and romance the doctrine of vacillating, but also not stubborn, able to reconsider and change his white supremacy; abstracting the battle from the cause; sacrificing plans.” Even so, he insisted, Grant “is not to the English imagination African-American rights to what Frederick Douglass called “peace the hero of the American Civil War; the hero is Lee.” among the whites”—created a hero who still infatuates the Ameri- What Arnold said of the English imagination, W.E.B. Du Bois, can mind: the knight-errant, Robert E. Lee. A.B. 1890, Ph.D. ’95, discerned in the American. To find “greatness and Grant became a casualty of this new narrative. At his death he was genius” in Lee’s demeanor, lineage, and generalship ignores the “ter- arguably the most famous man in America and the most recognizable rible fact” that he fought to preserve slavery. It was the South’s trial, American in the world. In 1900 President Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. Du Bois wrote in 1928, that the courage of its heroes would always MATHEW BRADY COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 1880, LL.D. 1902, launched his predecessor into the heroic firmament: “be physical…not moral…their leadership…weak compliance with “mightiest among the mighty dead loom the three great figures of public opinion,” not “costly and unswerving revolt for justice and Washington, Lincoln, and Grant.” And there he stayed, briefly, until right.” There could be no exoneration for Lee, “the most formidable revisionism did its work, and Grant, LL.D. 1872, became a butcher, agency” the country produced for preserving “4 million human be- a drunk, a serial failure, a dupe of the Gilded Age’s greediest men. ings” as “goods.” It is the trial not just of the South but of the United The season of Ulysses S. Grant is now upon us. Biographies by States writ large that it chose to fall in love with Lee and a Lost Cause Ron Chernow and others have appeared, as have new editions of as opposed to the necessary work of Grant’s cause: recognizing four Personal Memoirs. This spring, a statue of Grant will be unveiled at million “goods” as human beings. his alma mater, West Point. How, amid such welcome attention, can we celebrate Grant without turning him into the kind of hero he Elizabeth D. Samet ’91, professor of English at West Point, is the editor of The mistrusted? Articulating the particular challenge of Grant’s hero- Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (W. W. Norton). Harvard Magazine 43 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746.
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