U.S. Grant

U.S. Grant

Review by Dennis Showalter

U.S. Grant is primarily understood as a victorious soldier, and secondarily as a flawed president. Waugh, professor of history at UCLA, takes a different perspective. The Civil War remains America’s defining event. It left a heritage of courage and idealism, but also a legacy of destruction, recrimination and racism. Grant was essential to both. His generalship was decisive to the war’s outcome; his presidency structured the nature of Reconstruction.

Waugh presents Grant as a hero in the American mold: not an icon, but a person who struggled with flaws yet achieved greatness. A man of war, he simultaneously kept faith in a future beyond the battlefield: a future of national reconciliation and black emancipation. Her question is why Grant’s reputation stood so high in his own time and immediately afterward, but has since been so eclipsed, both generally and relative to counterparts like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.

The first half of this well-researched, clearly written book explains how and why Grant became the hero of the Union during the Civil War and the embodiment of the nation in the succeeding decade. As soldier-statesman and two-term president he sought to define, defend and preserve victory over an enduringly embittered South, and simultaneously establish and defend meaningful freedom for former slaves. The work’s second half covers Grant’s agonizing, widely-publicized death from cancer and the simultaneous completion of his memoirs. Still one of the greatest examples of the genre, it was taken up by North and South alike. Grant, the honorable soldier in the field and the generous victor of Appomattox, epitomized the magnanimity that made genuine reunification possible.

That in turn made his commemoration a major case study in the way historical memory is shaped and reshaped. The elaborate tomb that was a place of pilgrimage at the end of the 19th century fell into neglect in the 20th. So too did Grant’s legacy become distorted by the “gunpowder and magnolias” romanticism surrounding and obscuring the Confederate legacy. Lee emerged as the sophisticated master of the battlefield, with Grant relegated to the role of an unimaginative butcher. The Union and Confederate causes came increasingly to be regarded as morally equivalent because of the mutually fervent commitment they engendered.

As Lost Cause romanticism went out of academic and cultural fashion beginning in the 1960s, Grant’s reputation as a general has reemerged brighter than ever. Now it is his political heritage that suffers because of the incomplete nature of Reconstruction. There his failure was relative. Grant’s political acumen may not have matched his military gifts, but a Julius Caesar or a Klemens Metternich would have been little more likely to square the Reconstruction circle. Perhaps the next step in evaluating Grant’s mythic and historical legacies will be an understanding of just how unusual was even the limited reintegration of Northerners, Southerners and freed slaves in the context of a near-total civil war.

Hardcover: 384 pages

Publisher: University Of North Carolina Press ( October 15, 2009 )

Item #: 56-7520

ISBN: 9780807833179

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 0.96 inches

Product Weight: 21.0 ounces