ExclusiveUlysses S. Grant: Civil War Hero

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brennan. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous, and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans in our daily lives. At almost 250 years old, our country, the United States of America, has now had 47 presidents. Of those 47, only a few stand out in terms of being so recognizable either by name, image, or both that almost anyone could identify them. A few of those who are most recognizable by sight are those who are represented on our U.S. currency. Today, we're going to talk about one of those men, the president who is depicted on the $50 bill, U.S. Grant. The 18th president of the United States was Ulysses S. Grant. He was known by such nicknames as U.S. Grant or Uncle Sam Grant. Sometimes they even said that his initials stood for Unconditional Surrender Grant. They really stood for Ulysses Simpson Grant, which was not his birth name. In fact, his birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. Simpson was his mother's maiden name, and when he was appointed to West Point as a 17-year-old man, the politician who endorsed him accidentally wrote his name wrong. But it turns out that Ulysses didn't mind that so much because he liked the patriotism of the initials U.S., so it stuck for the rest of his life. Grant has the distinction of being the only man to serve two full terms during the 76-year period between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Of course, Abraham Lincoln was elected twice, but he died very shortly into his second term. After Lincoln, of course, he was succeeded by his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who became 17th president by default. Thus, it fell to Ulysses S. Grant to be the first president to win an election after the Civil War, and it was only fitting that he would win that because he was one of the great heroes of that war. Grant's life began rather surprisingly, considering how it would end up being this great military hero. He was raised in Ohio, and his father was a tanner. Now, Grant grew up in a very happy home. He was the oldest child in his family, and he did work for his parents as well as in neighboring business enterprises while doing his schooling. He was not particularly studious boy, and he didn't take too well to education, but he later developed a great fondness for reading novels, and he would become quite adept at arithmetic. He said in his formative years that he learned the three R's at the simple schoolroom where all the local children were educated, and these were reading, writing, and arithmetic. He never learned much more than the since he was never really trained in things such as algebra, yet he excelled at those mathematics so much that he considered being a professor of mathematics at one point. He helped his father in the tanning business, but he was not very fond of that. In fact, he was obviously a sensitive-natured boy who grew ill going into the tanner shop and didn't like hunting. Thus, it's not surprising that he wasn't too keen on going to West Point. What he did love as a boy was horses. He loved any work he could do with horses. One of the jobs he would do starting around the age of seven or eight would be to help with bringing in the wood that was needed for year-round fires. He would take the wood after the trees were cut down and drag the logs over to the wagon. He described that he wasn't big enough at the age of seven or eight to put the logs onto the wagon, but he was big enough to drive. So at the age of seven or eight, he was driving this horse-drawn wagon, and he loved anything that had to do with horses. Purchasing several of his own and learning to ride them, as well as using them to plow. As soon as he was big enough at the age of 11, he took over plowing in the family farm because he just loved those animals. He also loved traveling, and by the time he was a lad of 17, he was one of the best-traveled boys in his area, riding as far as he could in every direction and taking any opportunity to accompany a friend on some kind of an outing to a nearby city. He described that throughout his whole childhood, his parents neither punished him nor remonstrated him. It seems that he grew up in a very loving and congenial atmosphere. It seems that they were very kind and, I wouldn't venture to say lenient, but they were very kind and generous with him because they appreciated what a good worker he was. And in gratitude for the work he did for the family, he had the right to go fishing anytime he wanted or ride his horses around, go visiting. So it seems he enjoyed a good measure of freedom. At the age of 17, his father asked him whether he might not want to go to West Point. And he said, oh, I don't think that I would. And his father said, I think that you would like it. And so that was all there was to it. He wasn't forced to go, but since his father said that he thought that he should go, he went. And it turns out it was difficult to get into a West Point by appointment in those days. He only was able to get in because a neighbor's son had failed some exams, so he was able to take his place. The reason which Grant cited in his memoirs for taking this appointment was that he wanted to travel. He wanted the experience of going to the two biggest cities in the new nation, Philadelphia and New York. And he greatly enjoyed the journey of going by riverboat and then by train, his first time really riding a train. And he said once he'd had those two experiences, he didn't mind if he had a little accident of some sort, which would render him incapable of being at West Point. Nevertheless, he wasn't a quitter, so he went there and passed the tests quite easily. So he became a cadet. His first choice when accepting an appointment, of course, was to join the Dragoons, which was the mounted soldiers at that point. But he wasn't quite a good enough student for that, so he ended up being in the 4th Infantry. Right away, his plan was to just get through it as quickly as he could, if he didn't fail, which he was sure he would, and then go back to some other line of work, maybe becoming a teacher. Then he got the idea to do some kind of military service for a year or two as needed, and then get an appointment as the mathematics teacher at West Point, which you had to be a good soldier to do. So that was his plan, and surely he would have done it if it hadn't been for the Mexican-American War. He was forced to join that, but while serving there, he distinguished himself as an excellent soldier and became a bit of a hero. Thus it is that life took him in various unexpected directions. We know a good deal about Grant's life because he wrote an excellent memoir. He wrote this in the last years of his life, finishing the two-volume work just days before his death. He was encouraged to complete its writing by literary friends, including Mark Twain, who felt that he had a lot to say about his interesting life. It turns out that most of this two-volume work is dedicated to talking about his military career. He dedicated part of the first chapter to talking about his interesting family background and a detailed genealogy, starting from when his family came to the New World, and then talking a bit about his school days and his youth. But then most of it is dedicated to his legacy, fighting in various wars for the nation which he loved. He was not a man who loved war, yet he held firmly to the belief that you should never backtrack. And he didn't mean this just in a philosophical sense. He was superstitious about the idea of going back. He mentioned this in his memoirs, and it was seen in his military service. He would not retrace his steps. He would go around the long way or some other direction, but he thought it was very bad luck to retrace your steps. To the point that, as he said, if he was going along in some new place that he didn't know and he missed his turn, he wouldn't turn around and go back. He would go and find some way to turn so he could go by the other direction. And that evidenced his fierce military command style. Advance, never retreat. He would not retreat, so he just kept going farther, pursuing his enemy. Sometimes this was criticized. It seems that he might have wasted time or energy or resources by continuing forward when maybe he should have gone back. But it was this attitude to keep pursuing the enemy, which is what won the Civil War under his command. After serving in the Mexican-American War, Grant then joined the Indian Wars. After that, in the year 1854, he resigned from the military. Some felt it was because he had a drinking problem, and others said it was because he was lonely. But the truth of the matter was that he loved his wife and his, by then, four children very much, and he disliked being separated from them that much. Perhaps that did lead to loneliness and drinking, but whatever the case, he decided he was done with the military and he wanted to get into some kind of private business. So he tried to be a farmer for a while and proved not too successful at that. He tried to be a rent collector, but he didn't do too well at that either because he was far too sympathetic. He remembered all the many times that he and his family had been a bit behind in the rent and how difficult it is to make ends meet sometimes, so he never would collect or evict people or do what needed to be done. Eventually, he got into his father's tanning business, and there he was in the year 1861 when Abraham Lincoln himself came to that area asking for volunteers for the army for the beginning of the Civil War. He was inspired by the speeches he heard, so he decided to join. Before long, he advanced to the rank of colonel and then was appointed to be brigadier general in July, backdated to May. It wasn't long before he grew to higher ranking generals, became a major general, and he was in charge of the Army of Tennessee. Eventually, he was given the position of commander of the entire U.S. Army. Now, Lincoln had a difficult time finding someone to command the army during the Civil War. He went through so many generals before deciding that Grant was the man. He would have one man and then he would just be unafraid to change. That's a bravery which Lincoln had. If he saw that something wasn't working, out he'd go and he'd bring in the new man. Finally, he saw that Grant was the one who could really get the job done, and that was partly because of his very successful capture of Fort Henry, Tennessee in 1862, in which the enemy declared unconditional surrender. That made him a national hero and gained him his nickname of Unconditional Surrender Grant. From there, he just continued rising to higher and higher ranks of prominence until he was eventually in charge of the whole army. He was relentless in his pursuit of Robert E. Lee, the general who was leading the Confederate forces. He received a lot of criticism from people who called him Butcher Grant, saying that he wreaked unnecessary havoc and excessive death and destruction in his pursuit, that he would never retreat when perhaps he should. Reports that he was drunken during battles, even though people who were there with him said the opposite. But despite this, Lincoln wouldn't listen to any of it. He said, I cannot lose this man. He fights. He knew that he was the only man who was getting any results in the Civil War and that the Southern army was not as easy a foe as was originally thought. Grant and his predecessors found the Confederates to be an excellent group of fighting men and a very tough opponent. It was learned that during one very victorious battle, Grant was smoking a cigar. And when Northerners heard about this, they sent him 10,000 cigars so that he could keep smoking them and keep winning. It's not known how many cigars he smoked before this, but after that point, he grew in the habit of smoking around 20 cigars a day, which is probably why he ended up dying from throat cancer in his early 60s. Finally, in 1865, Grant was able to effectively defeat Lee's forces and get him to amiably meet with him in a courthouse and sign his surrender. He was very generous and considerate to the Confederate forces at this point, allowing them to keep all their horses and to return to their homes unhindered. He told his men to stop celebrating because he said, the war is over and now these former rebels are our compatriots. They are now part of our country again and we can't keep treating them like our enemies. Consider what a difficult war that was. In basically every other war in American history, the enemy is someone from a far off land, some distant country, or at least on the other side of a border. But after the Civil War, the Union forces and the Confederate forces had to stop being enemies and to be friends again. Because he was able to do this so effectively in ending the war, he was seen as a great hero who would be an important political figure. He had never been active in politics up to that point. In 1867, Andrew Johnson appointed him as the Secretary of War after he controversially fired Edward Stanton. Grant reluctantly took the post, but when Congress shortly thereafter declared that it was unconstitutional for him to have fired Stanton, Johnson encouraged Grant to refuse to leave his post. Grant did not listen to that because he said it would be unconstitutional to do so. So he left his post, making him grow ever more popular as Johnson was losing points with the whole nation. Thus, in the 1868 election, both political parties courted Grant to become a candidate. His family historically had been Whig and then Republican, so he decided to run in the Republican Party where he was unanimously nominated. And he won by a great margin in the Electoral College and a decent lead in the popular vote as well. He quickly realized that politics were not quite the same thing as war and that the Battle of Washington, D.C. was perhaps one of the most difficult he'd ever fought. Nevertheless, he was again unanimously nominated by the Republican Party for a second term, which he won by a similar margin. He struggled throughout both of his terms and he faced a lot of criticism. His administration was frequently accused of corruption and cronyism, as many people said he was doing favors for his friends. He also was accused of mismanaging many political issues because of his ignorance of politics. Despite that, he did accomplish a lot during his eight years. He oversaw the passage of the 15th Amendment, which granted all men the right to vote regardless of color, creed, or religion. He effectively saw the ratification of this act, which officially ended anything to do with the Civil War and brought all of those former Confederate states back into the Union. He pardoned all the former Confederates except around 500 of the highest ranking officials. He continued the work of reconstruction, trying to rebuild the country. Of course, that's one of the points where he receives a lot of criticism, like Andrew Johnson, for not being tough enough on the white Southerners and allowing them to continue too much prejudice against the former slaves. He dealt with international affairs as well, as he was able to come to terms with Great Britain over the issue of their supplying warships to the Confederacy, which hindered the Union forces. Economically, he succeeded in removing a lot of the greenbacks from circulation, and this was money which had been printed during the Civil War and was not backed by gold. And in so doing, he was able to raise the gold standard and lower inflation, which is quite an accomplishment. The second term was plagued by an economic downturn, the Panic of 1873, which some people said was partly his fault because with the buying back of the greenbacks that he'd ended up helping a lot of his friends who were in gold. There were some corrupt dealings with the attacks from alcohol and some other political issues, but he wasn't directly involved in almost all of that. Most of that were his other cabinet members and even his vice president, people who were close to him, but he was actually ignorant of a lot of those corrupt things which happened. That doesn't keep it from tarnishing his reputation. Nevertheless, he remained a strong president and continued to further the cause of the nation in its new peacetime. He considered a third term, and some considered it for him, but because his popularity wasn't as much as it had been in the past, he did not run for the third term. Instead, he and his wife and their teenage son went on a two-year world tour, making him the first U.S. president to do so, to navigate all around the world. He met Queen Victoria. He was the first person to shake hands with the Emperor of Japan. He actually mediated a disagreement between Japan and China. He met the Pope, and eventually, when he made it back to the United States, he was seen as a world statesman. With this newfound popularity, he considered running again for the election of 1880, but he didn't quite gain the Republican nomination, so he never was really involved in politics again. Then he tried to get involved with some banking schemes and a railroad, but unfortunately, his business partner was rather corrupt and cheated him, so he ended up bankrupt at that point. He did get a stipend from the army, which put him on again as a general, giving him some much-needed income, but it was actually the need for money which encouraged him to write his memoirs. He did, in fact, die shortly after finishing them, but they resulted in a very large amount of money for his wife and children, achieving what he hoped, a good support for his family. In fact, his memoirs became the most popular book of that era and earned, adjusted for inflation, around 10 million dollars. Partly because of these memoirs, he was one of the most revered and important citizens at the time of his death. He was regarded as a national hero, the man who had helped the country win the war, right alongside Abraham Lincoln in terms of the heroes who kept the union together, who kept the nation from splitting apart during one of its most difficult times. As the years passed and southerners began to romanticize the lost cause of the confederacy, Grant became viewed as less of a good figure, if you will, and his mistakes began to be highlighted more. But now in the 21st century, as we're studying him even more, it's seen that Grant was a wonderful citizen and an excellent man, who dedicated the better part of his life to fighting for his country, whether that was on the battlefield, in the White House, or even touring the world, building goodwill for the nation. Although a soldier all those years, he was indeed a peace-loving man, saying later, 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. Relating to his view to keep pursuing and never retreat, Grant said, wherever the enemy goes, that our troops go also. Interestingly, the two wars in which Grant fought the most famously were wars with which he disagreed. He felt that the Mexican-American War was one of the greatest injustices where a stronger country fought a weaker nation, and that the Civil War was quite a shame, and that the Confederates' cause was indeed a weak one. He said after its end, I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. We see from that what a sensitive man Grant really was. He was trained to be a soldier, and it became his life's work, but he had no love for bloodshed or the battlefield. He did believe, though, that it eventually was necessary to shed blood to eradicate slavery, and his quote on the matter, I think, really sums up how a lot of people felt at the time. As soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle. Grant himself came from an abolitionist family, but his wife came from a slave-owning family, so through her he did own a few slaves. But as that quote shows, when the Confederacy wanted to break away from the Union over that issue, he, like so many others, realized that slavery was no longer an evil which should be tolerated. It needed to be eradicated. Grant really deserves a lot of credit as a champion of free speech and equal rights for all races. He said, let us labor for the security of free thought, free speech, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and equal rights and privileges for all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion. Leave the matter of religious teaching to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contribution. Keep church and state forever separate. For those who want to know more about who Grant really was, I would highly recommend reading his memoirs. It's readily available online for free in a PDF form. Just reading the opening chapters, you get such a vivid picture of what kind of person he was. He wrote with cleverness, candor, simplicity, and great intelligence. It's so interesting to read the matter-of-fact way he wrote about the days of his life and his early childhood, his training at the academy, and what inspired him to become the man that he would be. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time to talk about more American legends.