|
|
"A collaborative political resource." |
President Ulysses S. Grant Deserves More Respect
|
| Parent(s) |
Candidate
-
|
| Contributor | IndyGeorgia |
| Last Edited | IndyGeorgia Apr 29, 2022 02:37pm |
| Category | Opinion |
| News Date | Apr 26, 2022 04:05pm |
| Description | There is nothing stranger in American history than the up-and-down reputation of Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant, who was born April 27, 1822, was the commanding general who ended the Civil War. He managed the great campaigns that captured Vicksburg and Richmond, saved Chattanooga, and compelled the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the main Confederate field army, and did it so well that President Abraham Lincoln apologized for not showing him enough confidence. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” published after he died in 1885, are a landmark of 19th-century American prose.
Grant may be a greater example even than Lincoln of the American rags-to-riches story. In 1861 he was working in his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Ill. Three years later, he was general-in-chief of U.S. forces. Four years after that, he was elected president.
Still, Grant gets no respect. As a general, he was accused of alcoholism—and he was an alcoholic, by the clinical definition of the term. As a strategist, he was denounced by First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln as an unfeeling “butcher,” feeding the bodies of Northern soldiers into battles that simply wore away the Southern armies. As president he was derided as a tongue-tied incompetent. Henry Adams, the ultimate Washington insider, sneered at Grant as an upstart, “inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money.” Adams snarled that Grant should “have lived in a cave and worn skins.” |
| Article | Read Article |
|
|
