Epilogue
THERE ARE MANY BIOGRAPHIES of Grant, so many that it seems to be something of a minor industry; some of them, like William S. McFeely’s Grant, are works of literature, many others more humdrum or narrowly military in interest. But from time to time it is necessary to remind Americans about Grant, first of all because his is a kind of real-life Horatio Alger story, exactly the one that foreigners have always wanted to believe about American life (hence the immense crowds that greeted Grant on his world tour), and that Americans want to believe about themselves. He came from a humble background; he had a harsh childhood; success eluded him at every turn no matter how hard he worked; then, all of a sudden, he rose to fame, to command, to power, to victory; then managed as few other people could have done (perhaps only Lincoln) to end the Civil War on a note of grace; served two terms as president; and ended his life by writing the most successful book in American literature. He was, in his lifetime, living proof of a substantial element of the American dream, and after his death continued to be for many years.
His presidency was clearly flawed, but what he sought as president—peace, prosperity, the binding together of North and South despite the wounds of four years of civil war, and good relations with foreign powers—was sought after by most Americans then and continues to be today. In domestic politics Grant sought to achieve fairness and failed, certainly in the case of black Americans; in foreign policy he avoided a bullying or a moralistic tone and refrained from the use of military force. Like Winston Churchill he believed that “It is better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, war, war,” and his decision to submit American claims against the United Kingdom to international arbitration and not to encourage the annexation of Canada shows a degree of common sense that we might well wish to see repeated in our own day.
As a general Grant defined for all time the American way of winning a war, from which, nearly 150 years later, we deviate at our own risk. Grant understood better than anyone that, first of all, any American war must be firmly based on the support of the American people and have an essentially moral base, and that the best way for the United States to win a war was to use to the full its great industrial strength and its reserves of manpower—and to apply them both unhesitatingly on the battlefield.
Grant was not a showy general. No admirer of Napoleon, he nevertheless had to some degree what Napoleon called “le coup d’oeil de génie,” the quick glance of genius, by which Napoleon meant the ability to see at once on the battlefield where the enemy’s weakness lay and how to exploit it with one unexpected blow. Grant, like Napoleon himself, didn’t rise to that level every time—at Shiloh he was caught off guard and fumbled his way through the first day of the battle, to be saved by Johnston’s death on the battlefield and Buell’s arrival at the last minute with fresh troops—but usually his keen grasp of the enemy’s position and its potential weaknesses was remarkable.
Lee had that quality, too, of course, though it failed him at Gettysburg, where he allowed the battle to become a “pounding match,” in Wellington’s phrase, which, given the enemy’s position on high ground with interior lines and Lee’s own inferiority in numbers, he could only lose, even though Lee was a better general than Meade. Both Grant and Lee were masters of the quick, surprising movement, the sudden change of plans that, for example, brought Grant’s army from north of Richmond to southeast of it, and led to the siege of Petersburg and, eventually, the end of the war.
The war they fought is studied all over the world in staff colleges, still today—indeed German tank commanders like Rommel, Guderian, Manteuffel, and Manstein (and their Soviet equivalents) learned Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign by heart, so that for them Winchester, Harrisonburg, New Market, Harpers Ferry, Port Republic, and Cross Keys were as familiar as German place names, and the landscape of the Shenandoah Valley was as firmly planted in their minds as that of the Rhine or the Elbe or eastern France. Similarly, in every imaginable language, in military academies all over the world, Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, his pursuit of Lee from the Wilderness to Appomattox, and his swift, implacable movements to the left to isolate the Army of Northern Virginia and force Lee’s surrender are taught and studied down to the last detail. The machine gun, the tank, the aircraft, the computer and “smart” weaponry have changed the way wars are fought, but not the way they are won. Grant understood topography, the importance of supply lines, the instant judgment of the balance between his own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses, and above all the need to keep his armies moving forward, despite casualties, even when things have gone wrong—that and the simple importance of inflicting greater losses on the enemy than he can sustain, day after day, until he breaks. Grant the boy never retraced his steps. Grant the man did not retreat—he advanced. Generals who do that win wars.
When the United States has succeeded in war, it has been by following Grant’s example.
When asked who France’s greatest poet was, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve replied, “Victor Hugo, hélas.” If I were asked who America’s greatest general was, I should have to echo Saint-Beuve: Ulysses S. Grant, alas.
Perhaps fortunately for the United States, the nation has never produced an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon. Washington was a commander of great dignity and fortitude, but retreated his way to victory, abandoning, at one point or another, almost all of America’s major cities. Lee was as fierce as Grant, when his blood was up, and one of those rare generals who was as good at defense as attack, and his formidable dignity still impresses Americans 140 years after his surrender at Appomattox. Still we should remember that it was Grant who finally beat him. Of Lee’s commanders Longstreet was a kind of Southern Omar Bradley, competent, reliable, a bit cautious, while Jackson was more like a Patton, a master of swift-moving war. On the Union side Meade was a solid and reliable general, rather like Field Marshal Harold Alexander on the British side in World War II, but hampered by his irascible temper and poor sense of public relations. Both he and Hancock deserved more than they got, from the country and from Grant. In World War II, MacArthur can be thought of as a latter-day McClellan, vain, arrogant, good at public relations, contemptuous of the president, and with one eye fixed on the White House, but Grant is the best of them—Grant and Ike.
Ike was, like Grant, a slow starter whose military career limped along in low gear for years. He missed the fighting in World War I, to his great disappointment, and only got to Europe after it was over as part of the war graves commission. He chafed miserably as General MacArthur’s aide in the Philippines, and in the end was promoted to lieutenant colonel only because Gen. George C. Marshall remembered him, from years of inspecting dreary peacetime army bases, as the best bridge player in the U.S. Army. Like Grant, Ike was no keen student of strategy, and he fumbled the ball badly in North Africa, but he had the rare ability to keep a coalition together, he was a good listener, he understood that the president was more important than any general (a lesson never learned by MacArthur), and above all he knew the importance of bringing overwhelming force against the enemy at his weakest point. Like Grant, too, may not have read Napoleon at West Point, but he had certainly read Grant’s memoirs.
Once Ike landed in France, he had to contend with two showier and more flamboyant generals, both prima donnas who believed that the war could be won with one brilliant strategic stroke. George S. Patton wanted to strike southeast deep into Germany, then turn north to cut off Berlin, while Bernard Montgomery was determined to advance to the northeast across Holland, cross the Rhine and occupy the Ruhr, cutting the German army off from its industrial base. Ike, like Grant, was always suspicious of panaceas. In the end he reluctantly turned Patton loose, but kept a tight rein on him (which Patton never forgave), and gave Montgomery a chance to prove his point with the airborne assault on the bridges at Nijmegen and Arnhem (Operation Market-Garden), followed by an armored attack that was supposed to roll over the bridges captured by the airborne troops until Montgomery’s army was across the Rhine. Market-Garden failed, and Patton’s deep slice into Germany was thwarted by the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German attack in the west. In the end Ike did what he had always planned to do, and just what Grant would have done—he used his superiority in numbers to advance on a broad front, from the Swiss border to Holland, day by day, with no showy tactics or sideshows, inexorably pressing the Germans back and inflicting on them losses they could not afford. It was the Wilderness and the advance on Richmond on a larger scale, and it worked, just as it had for Grant. The German army was better trained, better led, vastly more experienced, and equipped with better weapons, particularly in tanks, but none of it mattered; Ike had the men, and he could replace his weapons thanks to America’s industrial might—all he had to do to win the war was to keep moving forward, never retreat, and kill Germans in numbers they could not replace, and eventually they would collapse. And so they did.
Grant would have approved. He would have approved of the fact too that as president Ike was notably unwilling to fight another war. He had seen one, and that was enough for him.
Grant had seen two, and had no nostalgia for the experience. His memoirs are factual, precise, and about as objective as it is possible to be, but there is in them no attempt to portray war as glamorous, or glorious. Glory did not interest Grant. He would have hated Douglas MacArthur’s memoirs, and admired Ike’s for their modesty and calm tone. Grant would not have loved, like the Air Cav colonel played by Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, the smell of napalm in the morning (or at any other time). He hated war; the sight of a battlefield gave him no pleasure, and if he fought hard it was to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. “Next to a battle lost, there is no spectacle more melancholy than a battle won,” Wellington said, and Grant would have been the first to agree with him.
I imagine that Grant would have agreed with the “Powell Doctrine” too, which is (or was) that the American armed forces ought to be used only when there is strong civilian support in favor of their use, and then used in overwhelming numbers, bringing America’s vast industrial resources and strength to bear on the enemy for a quick, crushing, and complete victory, and then bringing the troops home again as soon as possible. The difficulties of Reconstruction in the South taught Grant—not that he needed teaching—that armies of occupation are no substitute for political thought, and that generals are not necessarily the right people to institute basic political reforms or to reconstruct societies.
Whenever we think about the uses of American power, we would do well to remember Ulysses S. Grant—and to reread his memoirs, which, along with the victory that he won, are his greatest and most lasting legacy to us.
Above all, any politician contemplating the use of force should read Grant before doing so.