Quote of the Day (Ulysses S. Grant, on His Simple But Grand Ancestry)

“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 75^th 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.”