“My family is American, and has been for
generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”—Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885-1886)
The Civil War
defined irrevocably what it meant to be American. Characteristically, the man
who more than any other was responsible for winning the conflict set out the
theme of his own life with this opening line. The statement does not beg to
become an aphorism, but like the tone of the rest of the book, it is steady and
winning. Its glow of quiet pride is unmistakable. Above all, it is credible—a fact lost on Larry McMurtry,
who reviewed Bill Clinton’s My Life
favorably in contrast with that of the man the novelist condescendingly called
“dear, dying General Grant’s.”
Ulysses S. Grant was born on this date in 1822. Nearly 12 years
after his death, on what would have been his 75th birthday, over 1 million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of his tomb—the largest in North America--in
New York. Over the next century, this mausoleum, funded by 90,000 donors and modeled on
one of the ancient wonders of the world, would be allowed to deteriorate disgracefully—a situation in direct contrast to the final resting
place of Grant’s great adversary, Robert E. Lee, in Lexington, Va. (The Confederacy might have lost, but die-hard adherents to the Lost Cause knew how to preserve their sacred monuments.)
It took the vigorous efforts of a Columbia
University student, Frank Scaturro—and a threat by the general’s descendants to
relocate his remains and those of wife Julia elsewhere, where they could be
taken better care of—for the National Park Service to provide, in time for the centennial of the tomb's dedication, a necessary $1.8
million facelift for a site that at one point had more visitors than the Statue
of Liberty. Every one of those dollars was well-spent, considering the general's enormous service to his country. When he was dying and
working desperately to complete his memoirs, a stranger sent him a $500 check
with an attached note: “'General, I owe you this for Appomattox.''
(By the way, though the 1997 work helped, much of
the area around Grant’s Tomb remains
badly in need of repair, as frankly acknowledged on its Web site.)
Grant produced his Personal Memoirs under harrowing circumstances, trying to
rescue his family from the bankruptcy into which he had been plunged a couple
of years earlier by an unscrupulous business partner. (That was another thing that makes him especially American to us: his Wall Street brokerage firm was fleeced by a swindler.) He completed it only four days before he succumbed to cancer, and during much of the writing he refused medication that would dull the pain but leave him too mentally groggy to write. His
publisher, Mark Twain, compared the book favorably with Caesar’s Commentaries.
Edmund Wilson must have had in mind the opening
line—and many others—when he wrote:
“Grant's Memoirs
are a unique expression of the national character... The book conveys
Grant's dynamic force and the definitiveness of his personality. Perhaps never
has a book so objective in form seemed so personal in every line. The tempo is
never increased, but the narrative, once we get into the war, seems to move
with the increasing momentum that the soldier must have felt in the field.
Somehow, despite its sobriety, it communicates the spirit of the battles
themselves and makes it possible to understand how Grant won them.”
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