36
NO ONE EVER ACCUSED ULYSSES S. GRANT OF BEING A POPINJAY. WHEN the greatest Union hero of the Civil War arrived in Washington in 1864 to formally receive his promotion to lieutenant general—the first since George Washington to achieve that exalted rank—he tried registering at the plush Willard Hotel. Failing to recognize him, the desk clerk there took one look at the scruffy little officer grasping a teenage boy by the hand and wearing a stained linen duster over his field uniform and decided that a tiny room on the top floor would do fine. Only when the clerk examined the guest book and saw the signature—“U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois”—did the best parlor suite in the house suddenly become available, with apologies.
Grant’s utter simplicity might have made good civilian accommodations hard to procure in 1864, but there was no doubt that this virtue served him well with his own men, as well as with the image makers who went on to transform him into a powerful symbol of Northern tenacity and egalitarianism. The war correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader saw nothing wrong with the fact that Grant’s “clothing was unexceptionable in quality and condition…his manner of wearing it…scarcely up to military requirements.…His overcoat was generally the army blue of regulation pattern no wise differing from those of officers or privates, with nothing on it to distinguish him or denote rank.” This aversion to pretense set Grant apart—that and the useful intervention of Illinois politicians who believed that his everyman probity destined him for wider fame, if only his virtues were adequately communicated. Among the results were enough Grant portraits to fill a museum—including the Society’s superb oil painting by James Reid Lambdin.
PLATE 36–1
Modest as he remained, there was no denying Grant’s understanding of his own appeal. Almost from the start of his stunning rise to fame in 1862, the innately unaffected general came to appreciate that his very lack of ostentation constituted the foundations of an irresistible—and potentially useful—public image. And notwithstanding his legendary disdain for vanity, he thereafter did whatever he could, whenever he could, to provide tangible examples for public consumption. In other words, as soon as he became famous, he proved ready, willing, and able to pose for artists.
Grant first catapulted to national attention in February 1862 by capturing Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. The following month, Harper’s Weekly immediately—and prematurely, as it turned out—heralded the victory as “the beginning of the end.” TheNew-York Illustrated News went Harper’s one better by publishing an almost unrecognizable engraving of “Major-General U. S. Grant, the Hero of the Recent Victories in Kentucky and Tennessee. From a Photograph by B. F. Chamberlain, of Cincinnati” (plate 36–2). Unfortunately, the artist who prepared this portrait apparently based it on not one but two sources—one outdated, the other unreliable. The first was an already passé photograph for which Grant posed in his Galena, Illinois, hometown before heading off for active duty. It showed him wearing an uncharacteristically flamboyant cockaded dress hat, cradling his sword in his lap, and sporting a long, flowing beard he would soon thereafter radically shave back. The second model was a more recent photograph apparently made in Cairo, Illinois, but it showed not the general but a beef contractor called William Grant who bore only passing resemblance to his famous namesake. In the absence of fresh photographs, charlatans had apparently begun hawking William’s picture as a genuine image of Ulysses. For good measure, the New-York Illustrated News provided its composite with epaulets! Over the next year, many printmakers continued to copy these absurd models. Grant apparently determined at some point to do something about the situation. Notwithstanding his growing command responsibilities, he began accommodating artists.
Major-General U. S. Grant, the Hero of the Recent Victories in Kentucky and Tennessee, woodcut engraving of a Grant look-alike, New-York Illustrated News, March 22, 1862
PLATE 36–2
In November 1863, for example, with his army camped at Chattanooga, Grant welcomed to his headquarters a twenty-six-year-old English-born, formerly pro-Confederate painter named John Antrobus, who had evidently been sent to Tennessee by a friend of the general’s in Chicago to craft a more heroic and realistic portrait. “Mr. Antrobus left here will [well] pleased with his success,” Grant advised his friend the U.S. marshal of Chicago, J. Russell Jones, on November 17. “I hope you will be equally pleased.” Not surprisingly, Jones was thrilled with the depiction of an anxious-looking Grant before Missionary Ridge (the scene of one of his triumphs), field glasses in one hand, the other resting on a captured Confederate fieldpiece. Enthusiastically telling the general that “if anything in this country beats it, I have yet to see it,” Jones reported that “Antrobus’ Studio is constantly thronged by people desiring to see it, but only the favored few get in,” promising: “On Monday it is to be placed on exhibition, the proceeds to go to the Soldiers Home—and as soon as I am well enough & can leave, we shall take it to Washington.”
The press was no less rhapsodic. “It is the man himself,” raved the Chicago Tribune, calling the picture “a great historical painting.” And with evident hometown pride, a Galena journalist called the canvas “a perfect masterpiece, that must give its author a place in the front rank of American artists.” But clearly, Jones and Grant’s other admirers had something more in mind for the picture than good local reviews. Jones made no secret (at least to Grant) of why he wanted the picture exhibited in the nation’s capital: he evidently believed the mere sight of the general, even on canvas, would win him prompt military elevation and perhaps even a shot at unseating, or at the very least succeeding, Lincoln as president. “I took the liberty of saying in a recent letter to Mr. Washburne,” admitted Jones, that if the president “and his friends” saw it for themselves, “Lincoln will then go in easy, and Grant must be made Lieut. Genl.…As things now stand you could get the nomination of the Democracy [the Democratic Party], but could not be elected against Lincoln. I tell everybody that I know nothing whatever of your views, but that I am satisfied that all you care for at present is to whip the Rebels and put down the Rebellion…and then the balance will take care of itself.” Somewhat mortified, Grant quickly made clear in a private letter to the chairman of the Democratic Central Committee in Ohio that he was “not a candidate for any office nor for favors from any party,” adding, however, in an eerie echo of Jones’s blueprint for future success: “Let us succeed in crushing the rebellion, in the shortest possible time, and I will be content with whatever credit may then be given me.”
With or without Grant’s acquiescence, the Antrobus portrait did prove influential. It inspired a widely distributed popular print and earned a special exhibition in a House of Representatives committee room once Jones recovered and took it east. Such was the growing power of the Grant image—or the disquieting rumors about his political ambitions—that President Lincoln himself felt it prudent to head up to the Capitol to examine the painting himself. He had not yet laid eyes on Grant, but he diplomatically pronounced himself “highly gratified” by what he saw.
When Grant himself finally made his way to Washington to meet the president and receive his third star, an observer noted that the general was still dressed in “an ordinary-looking military suit, and doesn’t put on any airs whatever.” Lincoln threw him a White House reception where “the torrent” of guests eager to catch a glimpse of the “rather slightly built” hero forced many spectators, and eventually Grant himself, to step onto the nearest couch in order to see and be seen. Tellingly, when the well-regarded painter Peter Rothermel immortalized this scene in a canvas titled The Republican Court in the Days of Lincoln, he took pains to suggest that Grant had now ascended to a far higher iconographical pedestal than a sofa. Rothermel’s depiction planted the general firmly on the East Room floor, right next to Lincoln—shorter than the president, to be sure, but not by much (in reality Lincoln had six or seven inches on him)—and by dint of his placement clearly the second-most-important figure in both the ballroom and the nation. Relegated to a nearby chair, too old and bloated to join the receiving line, sat General Winfield Scott (though he had in fact retired to West Point and was not present), his inclusion no doubt meant to symbolize the acquiescence of the old guard in Grant’s rise.
His admirers and political backers would never again be without an adequate supply of Grant images. The general somehow managed to find time to pose often for suitable photographic models during the busy final year of the war (some of them outdoors, on campaign). The print publisher who brought out an etched adaptation of a Vicksburg portrait accurately claimed that “the paint of it was hardly dry when Grant entered the town as victor on the Fourth of July.” Grant was aided in this widespread proliferation of images by his special patron, the Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, whom Lincoln instructed “to superintend the getting up” of a gold medal in Grant’s honor in late 1863.
Nothing did more to enshrine Grant as one of the signal heroes of the war—and of the art it inspired—than the myriad surrender scenes that proliferated after Robert E. Lee met him at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The inescapable contrast between the splendid Lee, adorned in full dress, a gleaming sword at his side, and the unself-consciously ill-clad Grant, wearing a mud-spattered field uniform, seemed to symbolize a working people’s conquest of the aristocracy. Such images elevated Lee to the status of living martyr of the Lost Cause but also immortalized the man who had so calmly and generously accepted his surrender without a show of military pomp.
After the war, it seemed that every Northern military hospital, Union League Club, and veterans’ organization commissioned a Ulysses S. Grant portrait of its own to adorn its walls. One of the best of these is the Society’s resolute but refreshingly informal picture by James Reid Lambdin (1807–1889), created from life in 1868 when Grant was a candidate for president of the United States (plate 36–1). The Historical Society’s four-by-three-foot canvas was acquired through the Beekman Fund in 1954.
Like most of the pictures created that election year, the Lambdin painting shows Grant still wearing his Civil War uniform, hand casually thrust into his pocket. Grant’s martial image was shamelessly exploited that season. Posing later that year for another artist, Grant confessed, “I have sat so often for portraits that I had determined not to sit again.” Of course he did so anyway, and repeatedly.
Lambdin, a Pennsylvania-born portrait artist who had studied for a time under Thomas Sully, also painted Daniel Webster, John Marshall, Lincoln, and such Union military heroes as Generals Ambrose Burnside, William Rosecrans, Don Carlos Buell, and George G. Meade. But his Grant ranks among his best—and perhaps with the best of all the portraits of the ever-elusive, chronically self-effacing, but reliably available subject.
To the end of his life, Grant remained of two minds about such projects. As often as he offered himself to artists and photographers, he never lost his Galena boy’s sense that the fuss was unnecessary and the entire genre of military art imperfect. Long after the fighting had ended, Grant insisted: “I never saw a war picture that was pleasant. I tried to enjoy some of those in Versailles, but they were disgusting.” Still, he never encountered a portrait of himself that elicited such a negative reaction, and he may have been thinking of the many useful examples when he added, “There was nothing in our war to be ashamed of, and I believe in cherishing the memories of the war so far as they recall the sacrifices of our people for the Union.” In the end, none of those “people,” save for Lincoln himself (perhaps), ended up more frequently and lovingly depicted by the portrait painters.
Unlike Lincoln, it might be noted, Grant had developed another talent while attending West Point that he demonstrated to good advantage as a student but sadly abandoned when he began his military career. As his surviving U.S. Military Academy records show, he was a passably good artist himself.