U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition

U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition

by Bruce Catton
U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition

U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition

by Bruce Catton

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Overview

A concise biography of the legendary Union general and controversial US president from “one of America’s foremost Civil War authorities” (Kirkus Reviews).

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Bruce Catton explores the life and legacy of one of the nation’s most misunderstood heroes: Ulysses S. Grant. In this classic work, Grant emerges as a complicated figure whose accomplishments have all too often been downplayed or overlooked.
 
Catton begins with Grant’s youth and his service as a young lieutenant under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War. He recounts Grant’s subsequent disgrace, from his forced resignation for drinking to his failures as a citizen farmer and salesman. He then chronicles his redemption during the Civil War, as Grant rose from the rank of an unknown solider to commanding general of the US Army and savior of the Union.
 
U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition details all of his signature campaigns: From Fort Henry, Shiloh, and the Siege of Vicksburg to Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Grant won national renown. Then, as a two-term president, Grant achieved a number of underrated successes that must figure into any telling of his life.
 
From Grant’s childhood in Ohio to his final days in New York, this succinct and illuminating biography is required reading for anyone interested in American history.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781504024228
Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 11/03/2015
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 201
Sales rank: 206,538
File size: 2 MB
Age Range: 12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Bruce Catton (1899–1978) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, historian, and journalist. He served in the navy during World War I and was the director of information for the War Production Board during World War II. Catton’s military and government experience inspired his first book, The War Lords of Washington, and he is best known for his acclaimed works on the Civil War, including Mr. Lincoln’s Army and Glory Road. His most celebrated Civil War history, A Stillness at Appomattox, won both the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1954. Catton was also the founding editor of American Heritage magazine. Among his other works are Grant Moves South; Grant Takes Command; and a three-part chronicle endorsed by the US Civil War Centennial Commission, The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat.
Bruce Catton (1899–1978) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, historian, and journalist. He served in the navy during World War I and was the director of information for the War Production Board during World War II. Catton’s military and government experience inspired his first book, TheWar Lords of Washington, and he is best known for his acclaimed works on the Civil War, including Mr. Lincoln’s Army and Glory Road. His most celebrated Civil War history, A Stillness at Appomattox, won both the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1954. Catton was also the founding editor of American Heritage magazine. Among his other works are Grant Moves South; Grant Takes Command; and a three-part chronicle endorsed by the US Civil War Centennial Commission, The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat.

Read an Excerpt

U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition


By Bruce Catton

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1954 Bruce Catton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2422-8



CHAPTER 1

End of the Golden Age


1. A Basis for Union

Always the human tide flowed west. It had swept over the brim of the Alleghenies years ago, and now there were no more barriers. Mad Anthony Wayne had broken the power of the red men at Fallen Timbers, and that cruel menace was drifting away like the misty wood smoke that dissolved across the growing clearings. Young Oliver Hazard Perry had smashed Britain's fresh- water fleet, and as the shot-weighted hammocks went dropping down the clear green depths of Lake Erie, British control of the interior went down with them. All of the Northwest was safe and open.

Beyond, running past the sunset, the mysterious Louisiana country lay waiting, securely American, threaded by dim trails of wonder and peril. The people could go anywhere they chose, quite literally anywhere: all the way to the undiscovered mountains and the deserts, beyond these to the extreme limit of the imagination. Men could very likely do anything on earth they had the courage to dream of doing.

There was then, in the early nineteenth century, a brief golden age, like nothing ever known before or since: the time of it measured in decades, its final effects beyond all measurement, putting a mark on a continent and on generations of people and on the abiding dreams a nation would live by. Freedom had become a commonplace of everyday life rather than a talked- about abstraction, and it was for everybody. Moreover, it carried its own compulsions. Men who could do everything they chose to do presently believed that they must do everything they could. The brightest chance men ever had must be exploited to the hilt. And the sum of innumerable individual freedoms strangely became an overpowering community of interest.

This community of interest extended in many directions and included many things, but first of all it was a common insistence on uninterrupted growth and development.

The log cabin beside which a sturdy family wrested from the stubborn earth everything that it ate, wore or used was romantic only at a great distance. To the people who lived there, the life meant hard work and privation, endurable only if it speedily led to something better and easier. Freedom had to mean something more than just the freedom to create a series of isolated backwoods slums, and regional self-sufficiency was the last thing anyone wanted. The promise of the new land could be realized only through a society that turned potential wealth into cash in hand for everybody.

The people of this brief golden age were gross materialists and lofty idealists at the same time. They never imagined that there might be a difference between economic freedom and political freedom. The two went together, opposite sides of one coin; like liberty and union in the oration, they were one and inseparable. All that mattered was a fair chance to get them. Today was better than yesterday and tomorrow would be better than today. All horizons were open to those who exploited every possibility to the utmost.

At bottom, this came down to a matter of good markets and ready access to them. That meant thinking in terms of the whole country, for this great interior could not be walled in. If men were to live here they must submit to its terms, and its destiny was continental. There must be a national road across the mountains, then canals to connect the lakes with the great rivers and the ocean, steamboats on those waters, railroads when railroad time came. These were not merely desirable: they were in the highest degree essential, for the values which the bright new land offered could be realized only if growth and development were continuous.

So there was a strange transvaluation of values. Pursuing immediate self-interest, the settler developed a profound feeling of belonging to a limitless national community. He believed in progress because he saw progress all about him — less grinding toil for this generation than for the last one, greater freedom of opportunity, a better place to live, finer things to do with one's leisure. The progress was both spiritual and material, and it took place simply because America was different, because in America men could do better by themselves than they had ever been able to do before.

As the land was opened, more and more people came to live in it. They came through the Buffalo and Pittsburgh gateways by the thousands. The "Ohio fever" became a legend, and they brought lifetime savings and household goods with them, to say nothing of immeasurable hopes and shining dreams. Because so many of them came, and because there seemed no limit at all to what men might want and get, this human tide pulled the national center of gravity along with it and helped to shape the future.

The people who lived then were never fanciful enough to say that they were living in a golden age. They had their full share of troubles and miseries and individual problems; and anyway a golden age can be identified only after it has ended. The one thing that is really clear about the men of that time is that they would react with unshirted violence and fathomless energy against anything that limited their ability to grow and expand and exploit the riches of their environment.

Against anything, that is, which threatened the unity and the continuity of the American experiment.

Specifically, they would see in an attempt to dissolve the Federal Union a wanton laying of hands on everything that made life worth living. Such a fission was a crime against nature; the eternal Federal Union was both a condition of their material prosperity and a mystic symbol that went beyond life and all of life's values. Men who had grown up to look upon the Federal government as a very handy and entirely indispensable instrument which they could use in their own self-interest would not even try to understand how other men could see in that same union an unendurable menace.

Nobody had to reason any of this out. When the challenge came the response was instinctive. During the first half of the nineteenth century the Middle West produced a generation that could find in the simple word "union" a thing worth making war for, worth dying for; a generation of terrible fighters, with here and there men who would know just how to lead them.

As one of this fateful generation, there was a child born in a cottage overlooking the Ohio River, at the Ohio hamlet of Point Pleasant, on April 27, 1822. He was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant.


2. Boyhood by the Ohio

Jesse Grant was on his way up, and he was just the man for it. Born in Pennsylvania and reared in Ohio, he was essentially a Yankee, both by ancestry and by natural aptitude. It sometimes appears that he was the exact opposite of his son Ulysses. Jesse was talkative, boastful, argumentative, buzzing about constantly with febrile Yankee shrewdness, gifted with a knack for making money. He was the sort to prosper in a new country; aggressive and ambitious, determined to get ahead and having enough native ingenuity and energy to make his wish good.

His Connecticut father, a veteran of the Revolution, had moved to the Western Reserve in northern Ohio around 1800, and he had farmed without prospering. When his wife died he let his family fall apart, moving to Kentucky with his two youngest children and leaving the others, Jesse among them, to be brought up by neighbors.

Jesse fared well enough in this scramble. He "boarded around" on different farms, doing chores in return for his keep, spent two happy years with the family of George Tod at Youngstown, got a very small amount of schooling, and at sixteen set out to learn the tanner's trade — a good trade on the frontier, with its insatiable demand for leather goods. Finishing his apprenticeship, he determined to work as a journeyman just long enough to save money so that he could go into business for himself. For a year or more he lived with his employer, Owen Brown, whose fifteen-year-old son was even then a brooding fanatic on the subject of slavery: a muscular, solemn-faced boy named John, who was to go through fire and bloodshed and hatred to a high gallows and step off into strange legend.

At first things went well. Jesse Grant saved his money, and presently he went into a business partnership in the town of Ravenna. Then he was knocked back on his heels by the perennial scourge of the Ohio frontier, a malady known to settlers as "fever and ague" and to more modern medicine as malaria. (A Cleveland newspaper at about that time announced a sovereign remedy: "It is simply common salt. A teaspoonful taken in water, and a tea-spoonful deposited inside each stocking next the foot, just as the chill is coming on. That is all there is of it.")

Frontier malaria was no joke. It put Jesse Grant out of action for a solid year. His money vanished, the partnership dissolved, he ran into debt, and when he was finally able to work he went down-state to Point Pleasant to ply his trade for a storekeeper who wanted to open a side-line business in leather goods. Jesse worked hard, paid off his debts — and, in the spring of 1821, married Hannah Simpson, daughter of a prosperous farmer.

It is possible to see more of Ulysses in Hannah Grant than in Jesse. She was quiet, self-contained, reserved; if her emotions ran strongly she made them run out of sight somewhere, so that the surface was never ruffled. Indeed, she carried this self-possession to the verge of outright eccentricity. When a horrified neighbor ran into the house to tell her that three-year-old Ulysses had taken a horse by the tail and was happily swinging there, in imminent danger of being kicked into the next county, she remarked that he would be all right — he "had a way" with horses. After this son grew world-famous she would quietly get up and leave the room if anyone praised him in her presence. She was to live beyond ninety, and to the end of her days was unshaken in the conviction that the nation was ruined beyond hope of recovery when the Democrats lost control of the government in 1860.

Ulysses was her firstborn, and if she had had her way he would have come down to history as Albert Gallatin Grant. (Albert Gallatin was a Pennsylvanian and so were the Simpsons, and the family greatly admired him). She was overruled. Her father thought Hiram a very handsome name, and her mother, who had been reading stories of the ancients, voted for Ulysses. Jesse sided with the old folks, and Hiram Ulysses it was.

A year after Ulysses was born, Jesse had regained his lost independence. With his debts paid and money laid by he moved to the county seat town of Georgetown, two dozen miles east — a pleasant place with a drowsy Southern-style public square surrounding a little courthouse, a town no bigger than Point Pleasant but more likely to grow. There Jesse bought land, built a house and opened his own tannery, and although he was never very popular with his fellow citizens — he was too boastful and contentious, and anyway he was a lone Yankee in an unmistakably Southern town — he quickly won a solid business success. His tanyard was a busy place. His teams plodded the country roads for miles, hauling hides and tanbark; to keep them busy, Jesse engaged also in general hauling, and eventually opened a livery stable. The Grants' brick home was enlarged, and self-educated Jesse proudly bought books for his library. He was comfortably well off while still comparatively young, and it was clear that he would be tolerably wealthy before he grew old.

Ulysses Grant, accordingly, had neither poverty nor deprivation in his youthful background. He was born into a home more prosperous than most, eldest son in a house where family affection was strong. The life about him was both exciting and leisurely — tense and aquiver with growth and vitality in an era of unimaginable development, but indolent and unhurried for all that ... wagons creaking slowly along sandy roads, farms and villages savoring the peace of rising shadows in an eternal summer afternoon, something of the broad land's serenity flavoring the lives that were lived so close to the land. It was a good time to be a small boy in a small town. One would suppose that the boyhood of Ulysses Grant must have been very happy.

Yet the story is that an unhappy childhood left a lifelong mark on him. He was shy and sensitive. His unpopular braggart father drew unpopularity on him, his own quaint boyhood blunders made him a laughingstock, and he never forgot it or quite got over it.

So says the legend. The famous anecdote of Ulysses buying a colt reveals the distortions in it.

The boy was eight, a neighbor had a colt for sale, and Ulysses wanted it. His father gave him twenty-five dollars and some good Yankee advice about the way to drive a bargain. Ulysses went to the neighbor and innocently blurted out the whole story: "Papa says I may offer you twenty dollars for the colt, but if you won't take that I am to offer tweny-two and a half, and if you won't take that, to give you twenty-five." The story got around, everybody laughed, and Ulysses was reminded of it for years to come.

Yet the result was not a sensitive child driven in on himself, forced in self- defense to cultivate an impassive stolidity to protect a bruised ego and a crippled, tormented psyche. Note, to begin with, that Ulysses told the whole story on himself, when he finally wrote his memoirs: told it, moreover, not with the bitter grin of a man unveiling something that has hurt him all his life, but simply as a rather funny little story. (Note also that he had what he is not always given credit for, a dry but very perceptive sense of humor.) Note, finally, that the first chapter of his memoirs, in which he tells about his boyhood, has a little glow in it, as writing does when a man looks back on something pleasant. If those were dark years when lasting wounds were received, there is little hint of it in his reminiscences.

On the contrary, every recollection is of a singularly happy boyhood. As Hannah Grant said, Ulysses had a way with horses. Before he was in his teens he far outclassed his playmates in a field which, in that premechanical age, would win prestige and inflate a juvenile ego as nothing else possibly could. He was not yet ten when he was working as a teamster in jobs where all the other workers were grown men. He was known all over the county as a youngster with a quite unaccountable knack for breaking and training spirited colts; farmers brought such animals to him, and it was common for admiring crowds to gather in the village square and watch him. When people came to Jesse Grant's livery stable to hire transportation to some other town, Ulysses was very often the driver who took them there and then brought the team back. When a circus came to town and the ringmaster exhibited a trick horse, and offered a prize to anyone who could ride it around the sawdust circle, Ulysses usually won.

The boy also had a good head for business. The one thing he did not like was to work in his father's tannery, where his job usually was to feed tanbark into the hopper of a macerating machine. Jesse noticed, with stolid Yankee admiration, that when Ulysses was summoned to this job he would often give some other youngster ten or fifteen cents to take his place while he took one of the Grant teams out and got a hauling job that would net him a dollar or more. It was recalled, too, that when the boy was hired to drive someone to Cincinnati, he would hunt up a fare for the return trip before he started back. His father sent him on a business mission to Louisville while he was still so small that it was necessary to equip him with a letter certifying that he had permission to travel — otherwise hotel and steamboat men would have been likely to flag him down as a runaway. One odd quirk was noticed: when the boy made a trip and accidentally drove past his destination, he would make any kind of roundabout circuit to get back to it, even at the cost of considerable trouble. He had some deep-seated reluctance to retrace his steps.

Schooling in small-town Ohio in the 1820's and 1830's was adequate, perhaps, but not fancy. The school usually had one room and one teacher, invariably a male. Corporal punishment was so universal that a whole bundle of birch switches might be worn out in a day, and it was so little objected to that the teacher had no trouble getting his pupils to fetch a new supply. Lessons were learned by rote. Ulysses remembered being taught so many times that A Noun Is the Name of a Thing that "I finally came to believe it." He got his share of the birchings, showed aptitude for arithmetic but no especial ability in anything else, and was brought to outright mutiny by one teacher who introduced a course in public speaking.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition by Bruce Catton. Copyright © 1954 Bruce Catton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

  • Contents
  • I. End of the Golden Age
    • 1 A Basis for Union
    • 2 Boyhood by the Ohio
    • 3 Dreams of a Young Soldier
    • 4 Old Rough-and-Ready
    • 5 Lessons in War
    • 6 Belfry at San Cosme
    • 7 Time of Seasoning
  • II. The Great Commander
    • 1 Looking Down the River
    • 2 Unconditional Surrender
    • 3 Turning Point
    • 4 Hour of Decision
    • 5 Unvexed to the Sea
    • 6 The Third Star
    • 7 The Qualities of Grandeur
  • III. The General in Politics
    • 1 Roads Leading Down
    • 2 The Word of General Grant
    • 3 Voice of the People
    • 4 Outside of Politics
    • 5 The Might-Have-Beens
    • 6 The Unsolved Problem
    • 7 If It Takes All Summer
  • A Note on the Sources
  • Index
  • About the Author
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