One of America's most popular historians shares his views of his own life and on the history of America, in a series of reflections on the Founding Fathers, Native Americans, Theodore Roosevelt, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, and the writing of history, as he celebrates the reasons why America is the best country in the world.

To America

Personal Reflections of an HistorianBy Stephen E. Ambrose

Simon & Schuster Audio

Copyright © 2002 Stephen E. Ambrose
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743529211

Chapter Five

Grant and Reconstruction

Ulysses S. Grant was the most popular American of the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. According to historian Geoffrey Perret he was even more popular than Abraham Lincoln. As no one held a plebiscite during the century, it cannot be proved. And what about Jefferson? Jackson? Or, my wife insists, Mark Twain?

To the people of the nineteenth century, Grant was the only Union general who beat Robert E. Lee, so he was the Man Who Won the War. But after being at or near the top to his contemporaries, Grant in the twentieth century fell precipitously. He became "Butcher Grant." To the nineteenth-century mind, he was the President who tried to bring about reconciliation with the South, but by the twentieth century his presidency was so disgraced by scandal that Americans ranked him at the absolute bottom of all the Presidents, behind even Andrew Johnson.

The cause of such extraordinary shifts in opinion was certainly not anything Grant did, or did not do. His record is his record. No investigative reporter or historian uncovered documents showing that President Grant had conspired to do this or that, or that he secretly used his positions to enrich himself, or to commit any other criminal or immoral act. Historians teaching the American history survey courses in the twentieth century denounced General Grant for his drinking, his recklessness, his wanton disregard for the lives of his troops, his appalling waste of the tools of war, his bullheaded insistence on attack, and more. They taught that President Grant ran a corrupt administration that was guilty of widespread financial scandal, that abandoned the newly freed African Americans to the mercies of their former owners, that turned the care of Native Americans over to do-gooder religious types, who knew nothing and learned even less, and otherwise was a disgrace. Worst of all, Grant turned the party of Lincoln from one of hope for the common man and for the newly freed slave into the party of big business. Those of us sitting at the professors' feet absorbed what they said and went out to teach it ourselves.

The historians were enunciating and sharpening the public's changed perception of what Grant had done, and why. Before World War I, people regarded Grant's losses in battle as regrettable but necessary. But after the losses incurred between 1914 and 1918, Grant came to be regarded as a general who was no different from Field Marshal Douglas Haig, or Joffre, or Ludendorff, or any of the other generals who want only to sacrifice their men's lives for their own glory. No longer were Grant's losses inevitable, yet suffered in a good, indeed a supreme cause - they were after 1918 regarded as inexcusable. Instead of praise, they brought on Grant's head calumny.

Actually Grant was a great general, as good as any America ever produced, far better than most. In his first campaign in the Civil War, in Missouri, he learned a lesson that he adopted as his constant guide: the enemy general is more afraid of me than I am of him. He was determined to win, whatever the cost. He personified an axiom used by Dwight Eisenhower in World War II, that in war, everything is expendable, even generals' lives, so long as you win. He won at Fort Donelson, at Shiloh, at Vicksburg, at Chattanooga. The essential elements in his victories were his willingness to make decisions and the will to carry them out. After the Chattanooga campaign, his chief of staff, General John Rawlins, said of him, "It is decisiveness and energy in action that always accomplishes grand results, and strikes terror to the hearts of the foe. It is this and not the conception of great schemes that makes military genius."

Grant displayed his tenacity and force of will most effectively in the Wilderness Campaign of 1864. After a drawn battle, the kind that his predecessors in command of the Army of the Potomac used as a reason to withdraw from Lee's front and retreat to the North, he told Lincoln, "I intend to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." He marched south, not north, until he finally forced Lee to surrender at Appomattox.

His success came about not because he was stubborn, but because he was smart. He knew much more than to simply tell his troops to charge. He knew how to handle his subordinates, what to tell them and what to order them to do. More, he understood the nature of the war. Despite the terrible losses the Army of the Potomac suffered, or those it inflicted on the Army of Northern Virginia, Grant knew his purpose was not to annihilate the Rebels but to force them to lay down their arms and rejoin the Union.

Thus at Appomattox, Grant knew full well Lincoln's wish for leniency toward the enemy. Agreeing with it wholeheartedly himself, he was determined not to humiliate Robert E. Lee or the Southern army. This was partly because he had learned to respect his opponent, even more because he wanted to restore the Union. So he made the surrender terms as generous as possible, indeed the most generous ever given to a defeated army after a long and bloody war. Lee and his army were released on parole, not sent into a prisoner-of-war camp. There would be no reprisals, Grant promised, nor any trials for treason. Grant had the Union quartermasters distribute rations to the near-starving Rebels. The Confederates were allowed to keep their horses "for the spring plowing."

Grant carried no grudge against his former classmates at West Point who had fought against the government. At Appomattox, he talked to Lee about their experiences together in the Mexican War. Later that day, inspecting the Confederate lines, Grant met James "Pete" Longstreet, who had been his best man at his 1848 wedding. "Come on, Pete, let's play another game of brag [a card game]," he said.

These extraordinary terms were granted to an army that had inflicted a half-million casualties on the Northern forces, fighting for one of the worst causes people ever fought for, and with the least excuse. But what Grant wanted, above everything else, was to sheathe his sword. There had been enough bloodshed and there was no need for reprisals.

The total casualties in the war were more than one million; for the Confederacy 94,000 battle deaths, 164,000 killed by disease, and 194,000 wounded; for the Union, 110,000 battle deaths, another 225,000 deaths by disease, and 275,000 wounded. Such losses could never be forgotten and could not soon be forgiven, yet it was essential that a reconciliation take place.

Sadly, the President for the next four years was Andrew Johnson. Abraham Lincoln had chosen him for the number two spot on the 1864 Republican ticket because he was a Democratic senator from Tennessee who had stayed with the Union, the only senator from the South to do so. Lincoln needed the votes of the Democrats and the support of the border states. Johnson brought some of them into line for the Republicans, but he was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was "a country for white men."

On April 15, 1865, he succeeded the assassinated Lincoln as President. He indicated he wished to follow the politics of moderation that had been outlined by Lincoln, and in his first half-year in office he oversaw the reestablishment of civil government in the South. Ordinances of secession were formally repealed, and the Thirteenth Amendment (that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude can exist in the United...