“Suffrage once given can never be taken away, and all the remains for us now is to make good that gift by protecting those who have yet received it”

Ulysses Grant

 

Ulysses Grant: An extraordinary person

 

After reading Ron Chernow’s Biography of Ulysses Grant, I recognize that my Southern education failed miserably to ascertain the full measure of the man.

 

 The greatest of all the traits of Grant's character was his moral and intellectual integrity, sincerity, veracity, and justice. He was incapable of any attempt to deceive anybody, except for a legitimate purpose, as in military strategy. Above all, he was incapable of deceiving himself. He possessed that rarest of all human faculties, the power of a perfectly accurate estimate of himself, uninfluenced by pride, ambition, flattery, or self-interest. 

 

GRANT'S CONFIDENCE IN HIMSELF

 

While Grant knew his own merits as well as anybody did, he also knew his own imperfections, and estimated them at their real value.

 

When Grant's attention was called to any mistake he had committed, he would see and admit it as quickly and unreservedly as if it had been made by anybody else. The fact that he had made a mistake and that is was plainly pointed out to him did not produce the slightest unpleasant impression. In Grant's judgment, no case in which any wrong had been done could possibly be regarded as finally settled until that wrong was righted.

 

He had absolute confidence in his own judgment, and the moral courage to take the highest responsibility. 

 

It has been said that Grant, like Lincoln, was a typical American, and for that reason was most beloved and respected by the people. The soldiers and the people saw in Grant or in Lincoln the personification of their highest ideal of a citizen, soldier, or statesman. 

 

Grant possessed courage and composure in the midst of the most trying events of battle, magnanimity in the hour of victory, and moral courage to compel all others to respect his plighted faith toward those who had surrendered to him.

 

Civil Rights

 

President Grant’s role in securing the full political equality of all Americans regardless of color is unsurpassed in presidential history. Even after popular will turned against the President’s efforts to protect the political and civil rights of former slaves, Grant refused to abandon his commitment to Blacks. After Grant left the Presidency, the federal government ended its policy of military intervention in the South and allowed the South to enter a new era of segregation and disenfranchisement.

 

After Grant until Lyndon Johnson, American Presidents paid scant attention to the plight of African-Americans

 

GRANT THE GENERAL

 

When Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, his reputation as a General was forever etched into the pantheon of great American military leaders. Along with his great adversary, Robert E. Lee, his fame as a military figure was secure. Below are some comments by historians and contemporaries regarding Grant's military acumen.

 

Abraham Lincoln, in conversation, 1864:
"He's the quietest little fellow you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe he had been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here.  Grant is the first general I have had. You know how it's been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, they all wanted me to be the general. Now it isn't so with Grant. He hasn't told me what his plans are. I don't know and I don't want to know. I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me. He doesn't ask impossibilities of me, and he's the first general I've had that didn't."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower (on the 20th anniversary of D-Day)

I think Ulysses S. Grant is vastly underrated as a man and as a general. I know people think this and that about his drinking habits, which I think have been exaggerated way out of line. The fact is, he never demanded more men or material from the war department, he took over an army that had a long history of retreating and losing. That army had no confidence in their fighting ability and Grant came in as a real outsider. He had so many disadvantages going into the 1864 campaign, now 100 years ago. But he met every test and rose to the occasion unlike I've ever seen in American history. He was a very tough yet very fair man and a great soldier. He has not been given his due.�"

 

 

General William T. Sherman:
"It will be a thousand years before Grant's character is fully appreciated. Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time... he fixes in his mind what is the true objective and abandons all minor ones. He dismisses all possibility of defeat. He believes in himself and in victory. If his plans go wrong he is never disconcerted but promptly devises a new one and is sure to win in the end. Grant more nearly impersonated the American character of 1861-65 than any other living man. Therefore he will stand as the typical hero of the great Civil War in America."

 

General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A., to someone who had slandered Grant:
"Sir, if you ever again presume to speak disrespectfully of General Grant in my presence, either you or I will sever his connection with this University.

 

General Philip Sheridan:
"He guided every subordinate with a fund of common sense and superiority of intellect, which left an impression so distinct as to exhibit his great personality. When his military history is analyzed after the lapse of years, it will show, even more clearly than now, he was the steadfast center about and on which everything else turned."

 

 

General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain:
"Grant was necessary to bring the war to a close... his positive qualities, his power to wield force to the bitter end, much entitle him to rank high as a commanding general. His concentration of energies, inflexible purpose, imperturbable long-suffering, his masterly reticence, ignoring either advice or criticism, his magnanimity in all relations, but more than all his infinite trust in the final triumph of his cause, set him apart and alone above all others. With these attributes we could not call him less than great."

 

General John B. Gordon, C.S.A.:
"The strong and salutary characteristics of both Lee and Grant should live in history as an inspiration to coming generations. Posterity will find nobler and more wholesome incentives in their high attributes as men than in their brilliant career as warriors. General Grant's truly great qualities - his innate modesty, his freedom from every trace of vain-glory or ostentation, his magnanimity in victory, his genuine sympathy for his brave and sensitive foemen, and his inflexible resolve to protect paroled Confederates against any assault... will give him a place in history no less renowned and more to be envied than any other man."

 

 

Shelby Foote: Historian
"Grant the general had many qualities but he had a thing that's very necessary for a great general. He had what they call "four o'clock in the morning courage." You could wake him up at four o'clock in the morning and tell him they had just turned his right flank and he would be as cool as a cucumber. Grant, after that first night in the Wilderness, went to his tent, broke down, and cried very hard. Some of the staff members said they'd never seen a man so unstrung. Well, he didn't cry until the battle was over, and he wasn't crying when it began again the next day. It just shows you the tension that he lived with without letting it affect him... Grant, he's wonderful."

 

T. Harry Williams, Military Historian:
"There is no difficulty in composing a final evaluation of Ulysses S. Grant. With him there be no balancing and qualifying, no ifs and buts. He won battles and campaigns, and he struck the blow that won the war. No general could do what he did because of accident or luck or preponderance of numbers and weapons. He was a success because he was a complete general and a complete character. He was so complete that his countrymen have never been able to believe he was real...Grant was, judged by modern standards, the greatest general of the Civil War. He was head and shoulders above any other general on either side as an over-all strategist, as a master of global strategy. Fundamentally Grant was superior to Lee because in a modern total war he had a modern mind, and Lee did not. Lee was the last of the great old-fashioned generals, Grant was the first of the great moderns."

 

James Dinkins, Army of Northern Virginia:
"There was one Federal general whose name lends luster to the American soldier and to the American citizen, who is respected and revered by every fair minded man, who understood the prowess of the Southern soldier, and who removed from the South the sting of defeat by the magic touch of his magnanimity in dealing with the vanquished. Grant was the genius of the war on the Federal side. He never made war on defenseless women and old men. He crushed the Confederacy with superior numbers, but he paroled and trusted the Confederate. He knew that if he put the Southern solider on his honor he would make a good citizen and that if the leaders were imprisoned, the Southern people would become a nation of bushwhackers. By that act he bound to him with hooks of steel the Southern hears, which his magnanimity won at Appomattox."