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Before the Civil War, I had already been heavily involved in the army. I had gone to military school, and sense I excelled in school so much I was sent to fight in the Mexican-American war. Seeing that I was doing so well so early on, they sent me to do more military work in places farther away and at first I was doing just fine, but then I started to miss my family more and more, to a point that it started to show in my performance on the battle field, so then i decided to take a couple years off to spend more time with my family. That is, until the Civil War. The reason I decided to join back into the military once there was a serious war to fight was because I knew how to train soldiers and in reality, being able ot fight in those wars was my passion.

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A Photograph Of Me In My Early Years Of Being President

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A Photograph Of Me In My Early Years Of Being President

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How a notorious anti-Semitic order changed the course of Jewish life in America-ultimately, for the better.

Photo from Brady-Handy Photograph Collection/Library of Congress.

On Dec. 17, 1862, as the Civil War entered its second winter, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued the most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history: " The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order." Known as General Orders No. 11, the document blamed Jews for the widespread smuggling and cotton speculation that affected the area under Grant's command. That area, known as the "Department of the Tennessee," stretched from northern Mississippi to Cairo, Ill., and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River. Grant ordered Jews expelled from every inch of it and warned that "any one returning ... will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners." Lest anyone try to change his mind, Grant made clear that "no passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application for trade permits."

Americans today are often surprised to learn that Ulysses S. Grant once expelled "Jews as a class" from his war zone. It seems incredible that he could blame Jews for the sins of smugglers and traders-most of whom were not actually Jewish at all-and expel them from the entire territory under his command. Some Jews at the time wondered whether their new homeland was coming to resemble anti-Semitic Europe at its worst.

In the end, only a small number of Jews were seriously affected by General Orders No. 11. Within hours of its issuance, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest staged a daring raid that tore up rail and telegraph lines around Grant's headquarters at Holly Springs, Miss. The resulting breakdown in communications meant that news of General Orders No. 11 spread slowly.

Eleven days later, when Jews were belatedly expelled from Paducah, Ky., one of those affected, Cesar Kaskel, rushed to Washington to protest. With help from Cincinnati's outgoing Republican congressman, John Addison Gurley, who had ready access to the White House, he was able to see Abraham Lincoln at once.

"And so," Lincoln is said to have drawled when Kaskel displayed General Orders #11 before him, "the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?"

"Yes," Kaskel responded, "and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham's bosom, asking protection."

"And this protection," Lincoln declared "they shall have at once."

Even if (as seems likely) no such conversation actually took place, Lincoln did instantly instruct the general-in-chief of the Army, Henry Halleck, to countermand General Orders No. 11. Two days later, several urgent telegrams went out from Grant's headquarters in obedience to that demand: "By direction of the General in Chief of the Army at Washington," they read, "the General Order from these Head Quarters expelling Jews from this Department is hereby revoked."

In a follow-up meeting with Jewish leaders, Lincoln reaffirmed that he knew "of no distinction between Jew and Gentile." "To condemn a class," he emphatically declared, "is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners." In short order, attention returned to the battlefield, where, within a year, Grant's victory at Vicksburg elevated him to the status of a national hero.

But like any trauma, General Orders No. 11 turned out to have lingering effects. In the short term, it brought to the surface deep-seated fears that, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jews might replace blacks as the nation's most despised minority. Some Jewish leaders explicitly feared that freedom for slaves would spell trouble for Jews.

Later on, in 1868, when Grant ran for president, the memory of General Orders No. 11 sparked passionate debates between Jews who extolled Grant as a national hero and those who reviled him as a latter-day Haman, the enemy of the Jews from the Book of Esther. The issue thrust Jews, for the first time in American history, into the center of the political maelstrom. The excruciating question that Jewish Republicans faced-should they vote for a man who was good for the country, even if they thought he was bad for the Jews-prefigured a central conundrum of Jewish politics, the question of multiple loyalties. Those who injected General Orders No. 11 into the presidential campaign plainly sought to appeal to Jewish voters on the basis of their religions. But was it legitimate for Jews to base their vote on such considerations? Or should they cast aside their special interests and consider only the national interest? Should General Orders No. 11 single-handedly determine how Jews vote, or ought they, as responsible citizens and voters, weigh the totality of issues facing the country before making up their minds?

Still later, during the eight years of Grant's presidency, memories of General Orders No. 11 surfaced repeatedly. Eager to prove that he was above prejudice, Grant appointed more Jews to public office than any of his predecessors, and, in the name of human rights, extended unprecedented support to persecuted Jews in Russia and Romania. Time and again, partly as a result of his enlarged vision of what it meant to be an American and partly in order to live down General Orders No. 11, Grant consciously worked to assist Jews and secure them equality.

Nevertheless, the memory of what his wife, Julia, called "that obnoxious order" continued to haunt Grant to his death in 1885. Especially when he was in the company of Jews, the sense that in expelling them he had failed to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. He apologized for the order publicly and repented of it privately. He consciously excluded any mention of it from his acclaimed Memoirs. He gloried in the fact that, on his deathbed, Jews numbered among those who visited with him and prayed for his recovery. Jews also participated wholeheartedly in the national mourning that followed his death in 1885, and later in the dedication of his tomb. They did so in spite of General Orders No. 11, recognizing, as the Reform Jewish leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise noted at the time, that Grant had "often repented" of his order, and "that the wise also fail."

The story of General Orders No. 11 and its lingering impact fills in a missing and revealing "Jewish" chapter in the biography of Ulysses S. Grant. The order and its aftermath also shed new light on one of the most tumultuous eras in American history, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. During these years-America's "Second Founding" as one historian terms it-the definition of what America is and who "We the People" should include convulsed the country.Most of the debate naturally centered on the status of black people, but there was likewise substantial debate concerning the Jews. Though they formed less than 1 percent of the population at that time, Jews were by far the most significant non-Christian immigrant group in the nation and their numbers had been increasing rapidly-from about 15,000 in 1840 to some 150,000 on the eve of the Civil War. General Orders No. 11 implied that these Jews formed a separate "class" of Americans, distinct from their neighbors, and subject, especially when suspicions of smuggling fell upon them, to collective forms of punishment, including expulsion. The National Reform Association, which was particularly active during the 1870s, went further, seeking to "declare the nation's allegiance to Jesus Christ." A "religious" amendment, proposed repeatedly during the Grant years, on the theory that the Civil War was punishment for "the absence of any adequate recognition of God" in the nation's founding documents, looked to write Christianity directly into the Constitution itself.

Against this backdrop, Ulysses S. Grant's surprising embrace of Jews during his presidency takes on new significance. Through his appointments and policies, Grant rejected calls for a "Christian nation," and embraced Jews as insiders in America, part of "We the People." During his administration, Jews achieved heightened status on the national scene. Judaism won recognition (at least from him) as a faith co-equal to Protestantism and Catholicism ("the [P]rotestant, the Catholic, and the Jew appointed days for universal prayer in my behalf," he boasted to his eldest son on his deathbed). Anti-Jewish prejudice declined. And Jews looked forward optimistically to a liberal epoch characterized by sensitivity to human rights and inter-religious cooperation. In the president's mind, a direct parallel existed between the treatment of blacks under Reconstruction and the treatment of Jews. Indeed, he described "respect for human rights" as the "first duty of those set as rulers over nations," and specifically included both blacks and Jews as being among the unfortunates whom "those in authority" should go out of their way to protect, "to rescue and redeem them and raise them up to equality with the most enlightened." He sought to create new opportunities for members of both minority groups.

Unfortunately, those opportunities did not last. Reconstruction proved to be an "unfinished revolution" for black Americans and so it was (albeit not nearly to the same extent) for Jews. In 1877, the same year that Grant left the White House, his friend, banker Joseph Seligman was excluded from the Grand Union Hotel as an "Israelite." Four years later, the great Reform Jewish leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise complained that "we poor optimists are sadly disappointed and made false prophets." Across the United States, anti-Semitic restrictions and quotas led to a substantial decline in Jews' social status. The "golden age" of the Grant years had, by then, become a distant memory. By 1897, professor Richard Gottheil of Columbia University felt that "gradually, but surely, we are being forced back into a physical and moral ghetto ... our social lines run as far apart from those of our neighbors as they did in the worst days of our European degradation."

Ulysses S. Grant was as popular as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the late 19th century, but in the 20th his reputation fell under withering assault. Historians, many of them southerners critical of his benevolent policy toward black people, criticized both the way he waged war and the way he forged peace. They blamed him for the Civil War's high death rate, for the failures of Reconstruction, for the corruption of his underlings, and for his personal failings. They derided him as a butcher and a drunkard. Historians ranked him close to the bottom among all American presidents.

In recent years, however, a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Ulysses S. Grant has taken place. "Though much of the public and even some historians haven't yet heard the news," historian Sean Wilentz observed in the New York Times, "the vindication of Ulysses S. Grant is well under way. I expect that before too long Grant will be returned to the standing he deserves-not only as the military savior of the Union but as one of the great presidents of his era, and possibly one of the greatest in all American history." A fresh look at Grant's relationship with the Jewish community reinforces this view. It shows how General Orders No. 11 and its aftermath transformed Grant's career-sensitizing him to prejudice and teaching him to treat members of minority groups as individuals responsible for their own actions.

General Orders No.11 also greatly strengthened America's Jewish community. The successful campaign to overturn the order made Jews more self-confident. The tempestuous 1868 election, where so much ink was spilled concerning the "Jewish vote," taught them much about politics, and about the power-real and perceived-of a well-organized minority group . The fact that Ulysses S. Grant selected, for the first time, a Jewish adviser (Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia Simon Wolf), appointed a series of Jews to public office (including Edward S. Salomon, governor of Washington Territory, and Dr. Herman Bendell, superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arizona Territory), and, as president, attended the dedication of a synagogue further enhanced Jews' self-confidence.

It is always easy to exaggerate the political impact of a religious or ethnic minority, and Jews would have many occasions in the post-Grant years to learn the limits of their ability to win political appointments and effect public policy. Nevertheless, General Orders No. 11 marked a turning point in American Jewish history. Paradoxically, Ulysses S. Grant's order expelling the Jews set the stage for their empowerment.

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Ulysses S. Grant's Notoriously Anti-Semitic Order and How It Changed the Lives of Jews in America

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How a notorious anti-Semitic order changed the course of Jewish life in America-ultimately, for the better. On Dec. 17, 1862, as the Civil War entered its second winter, Gen. Ulysses S.

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What Were Some Reasons That I Started To Change?

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What Were Some Reasons That I Started To Change?

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Looking back on the things that changed me through out the war, I can see that a lot of it has to do with my performance in the war. Like when I was put as leader of a attack and we had to surrender because there were to many Confederate soldiers and not enough of my soldiers. And even before that there was an unexpected battle in the early stages of the war and I had served very poorly while fighting, so poorly in fact that it almost cost me my job.

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A Photograph Of Me Leading My Troops Through Battle

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A Photograph Of Me Leading My Troops Through Battle

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The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial is the Lost Monument of Washington. It might as well be invisible. No one knows it's there. Its location is actually spectacular, right at the foot of Capitol Hill, at the opening to the Mall. The memorial features one of the largest equestrian statues in the world, set on a platform 250 feet wide, with ancillary sculptures that are heaving with action and drama. Grant is, appropriately, the calm man at the center of the storm. He stares fixedly down the Mall toward Lincoln in his memorial. His horse is so passive-looking it appears to be waiting for someone to insert a quarter. Washington is full of statues to Civil War heroes whose achievements have been largely forgotten. Logan. Thomas. Sheridan. Scott. Farragut. McPherson. But at least these folks are surrounded by pedestrians and motorists. ¶ Grant, huge as he is, is dwarfed by the Capitol and is flanked by lots with signs reading "Permit Parking Only." The oceanic Capitol Reflecting Pool was built in 1971 as if to block Grant from charging onto the Mall. The memorial is a hike from the museums, Union Station or any Metro stop. Tour buses stop nearby, but everyone walks toward the Capitol - except groups that pose on the steps of the memorial because it offers an excellent spot to capture the Capitol as a backdrop. Grant is left out of the frame.

One hundred and fifty years ago this spring, Ulysses S. Grant took command of all the armies of the United States. He developed a grand strategy to defeat the Confederacy and ultimately, with much struggle, succeeded. As much as any person not named Abraham Lincoln, Grant saved the Union. He went on to serve two terms as president and write some of the most celebrated memoirs in the history of American letters.

More than 1 million people, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, attended his funeral procession in New York in 1885 on a national day of mourning.

A million people attended the dedication of his tomb on the northern tip of Manhattan in 1897.

And then the veterans of the war died off, and the populace as a whole largely forgot why they had once revered the little man from Ohio.

When Groucho Marx asked on his 1950s TV quiz show, "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?," he was just being silly (no one is actually buried there - the remains of the 18th president and his wife, Julia, are in sarcophagi). But by then the tomb was no longer one of the most visited sites in New York. It had fallen into disrepair, marred by graffiti and vandalism. That matched the decline in Grant's reputation among historians.

Many ranked him among the very worst presidents. They maligned his military prowess. The "Lost Cause" interpretation of the war, created by the Confederate generation and later adopted by such influential historians as Douglas Southall Freeman, portrayed Southern commanders as chivalrous aristocrats waging a noble war against the industrialized and more populous North. They heaped praise on Robert E. Lee at the expense of the man to whom Lee surrendered.

Grant has been on the $50 bill for 101 years, but even there he's an outlier - because how often do you see a fifty?

"Grant has been forgotten. And I don't know that it's ever going to change that dramatically," said Joan Waugh, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of " U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth."

Her book is among a number of favorable reassessments of Grant. Additional biographies are forthcoming from such acclaimed historians as Ronald C. White Jr. and Ron Chernow. Lee's reputation has suffered in recent decades, while Grant's has been gradually rehabilitated. Even if this is so, Waugh writes, his reputation in popular culture is that of a "drunken butcher" (he was periodically a heavy drinker and, yes, many soldiers died because of his straight-ahead style of warfare) and "worst president."

Something about Grant got lost over time, which is why, when Waugh would eat her lunch at the Grant Memorial while researching her book, she would often hear people say as they looked up at the horseman, "Who's that guy?"

Named by accident

Hiram Ulysses Grant, the son of a tanner, was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822. When a congressman nominated the teenage Grant to West Point, he mistakenly wrote the boy's name down as Ulysses S. Grant, which stuck. At West Point, Grant proved to be an average student. He was an excellent horseman and fought with distinction in the Mexican War.

Rough times followed. Military duty often separated him from his wife, with whom he would raise four children. After serving at a lonely outpost on the California coast and struggling with alcohol, he resigned from the army and bounced around for a few years, trying his hand at farming and winding up working in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Ill.

Then the war came.

"He had unknown qualities that were just waiting for an opportunity to be revealed," said Steve Laise, chief of cultural resources for the National Park Service's New York City sites, including Grant's Tomb.

He racked up victories in the West, including at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. He earned his nickname, "Unconditional Surrender Grant," at Fort Donelson in Tennessee when the opposing commander asked for terms of capitulation and he replied, "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works."

He added stars to his shoulders until finally, in March 1864, Lincoln elevated him to lieutenant general, the first officer to be promoted to that rank since George Washington. Grant would now be general in chief.

He was no majestic figure like Washington. Grant was 5 feet 8 inches tall, not quite 140 pounds, slouchy, rough-looking, and handsome only in the renderings of artists. People noticed his steely gaze and headlong way of walking.

One Union officer famously wrote that Grant "habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it."

In the Army of Northern Virginia, the rebel general James Longstreet, who knew Grant well from their military adventures long before the great rupture, knew what was coming: "That man will fight us every day and every hour 'til the end of the war."

At photographer Mathew Brady's studio, an assistant to Brady fell partway through a skylight and showered potentially lethal glass shards all over the floor next to Grant, who had been sitting for a portrait. Grant barely flinched. He was almost superhumanly imperturbable. He was the kind of man who did not seem to hear the shrieking of the world.

"I think his secret was his utter unflappability and his ability to keep his eye on the ball no matter what else was going on," said Gary W. Gallagher, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of numerous books about the war.

That's what the Union would need in the painful spring and summer of 1864, which Gallagher calls the low point of the war for the U.S. government because civilian morale had plummeted. All eyes were on the coming presidential election. The Democrats were angling to nominate Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, who ran as a War Democrat but whose party's platform called for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy that could permit the survival of slavery.

Against this backdrop, the Confederacy didn't need to defeat the Union forces; it needed merely to hang on. The Union's will to fight might well succumb to exhaustion.

Lincoln and Grant both understood this.

Grant had planned to return to the West, but the public was clamoring for him to face Lee head-on. Half a dozen Union offensives in Virginia had already failed, and although from a purely military perspective the war in the West was just as important, the Eastern theater produced the greatest political reverberations.

Grant decided to attach himself to the Army of the Potomac, which, while officially commanded by Maj. Gen. George Meade, became in the public's mind and for practical purposes "Grant's Army."

His broad strategy called for simultaneous advances on Confederate positions from multiple angles. Grant would press upon Lee directly over land from the north, while other forces would move up the James River and in the Shenandoah Valley. Advancing in the West were multiple Union armies, including one under the command of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had his eye on Atlanta. Grant knew that if he fully occupied Lee's army, Lee could not send reinforcements to the rebels trying to halt Sherman's march through the heart of the Confederacy.

On May 4, the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River, heading south. So began what came to be known as the Overland Campaign. Grant's goal was to fight Lee's army, destroy it and march on to Richmond.

As Grant wrote in his memoirs, "This was not to be accomplished, however, without as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed; not to be consummated in a day, a week, a month, single season. . . . We had to have hard fighting to achieve this. The two armies had been confronting each other so long, without any decisive result, that they hardly knew which could whip."

Virtues of obstinateness

The key moment came early in the campaign. As soon as Grant's army had crossed the river, and as his men moved through a forest dense with underbrush known as the Wilderness, Lee pressed the attack. Lee was outnumbered nearly 2-1 and did not want to let the battle get onto open ground. The rebels charged and the woods quickly filled with smoke. Wounded men were immolated as fire swept through the forest. The Battle of the Wilderness proved to be a ghastly two-day affair that prefigured more horrors to come.

At the end of the battle, the Army of the Potomac had 18,000 casualties, and it looked like another defeat in Virginia. But when Grant rode his horse to a crossroads, he turned south, not north.

His men let out a cheer. Grant would not retreat back toward Washington as so many other generals had done after previous battles. He pressed on, toward Spotsylvania Court House.

The history books tell of discrete battles at Spotsylvania, North Anna and Cold Harbor, but in fact this became a single 40-day, meat-grinder engagement with barely a quiet interlude long enough to pick up the bodies on the battlefield.

Grant's one grave error was ordering an assault on fortified rebel positions at Cold Harbor, and he forever regretted it. After that bloodbath, Lincoln wrote, "It can almost be said that the 'heavens are hung in black.' "

In the words of Confederate commander Evander Law, "It was not war, it was murder."

The critics called Grant a butcher. None other than Mary Lincoln used the term after Cold Harbor. She called Grant an "obstinate fool."

Lee assumed that Grant would gather strength for another charge at his main line, but Grant slyly slipped away south, sneaking the bulk of his army across the James and advancing to Petersburg. He hoped to cut the supply lines from the south leading into Richmond, but his men were too slow and too exhausted, too frazzled by six weeks of unrelenting combat, to take advantage of their numerical advantage. Lee reinforced Petersburg and the two sides dug in for what would become a 10-month siege. This became trench warfare.

It looked bad for Lincoln and Grant. The prize of Richmond had not been seized and Lee remained in the field. Sherman in the West had yet to reach Atlanta. The Confederate general Jubal Early staged a raid on the nation's capital, reaching Silver Spring, so close to the White House that Lincoln himself ventured (a bit recklessly) to the front line to see his first Civil War battle up close. Early was driven back, but this hardly seemed a season of triumph for the Union cause. Lincoln's reelection looked increasingly unlikely.

Everything that happened in the spring and summer of 1864 proved the adage of Clausewitz that war is politics by other means. The events also showed that war is a contest of wills. Battlefield victories and the occupation of territory do not necessarily yield what you need, which is capitulation.

But in the darkest days for Lincoln and the Union cause, Grant's strategy finally paid off. On Sept. 2, Sherman marched into Atlanta, bearing his chilling message, "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it." The news of Atlanta's capture reversed public opinion in the North about the war.

Now came the endgame - Sherman's march to the sea, Gen. Philip Sheridan's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and the tightening noose on Lee in Virginia. Lincoln would win reelection; the war's duration would be measured in months.

It is not reckless to guess that without Grant's bullheaded determination, the story of the Civil War would have played out differently, perhaps ending with the inauguration of President George B. McClellan and the perpetuation of slavery.

A reluctant president

Grant got a fourth star, and as the embodiment of the Union he almost inexorably followed the path to the White House. He was not eager to be president nor particularly adept at the job. His presidency was troubled by scandals among his aides and appointees and sectional strife over Reconstruction. He won a second term, handily, and in his second inaugural address said, "I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history, which today I feel that I can afford to disregard in view of your verdict."

Soon thereafter came the Panic of '73, a deep depression, the takeover of Congress by Democrats and the disintegration of Reconstruction.

Grant's admirers note many accomplishments: He pushed for passage of the 15th Amendment giving male African Americans the vote, sent federal troops to fight the Ku Klux Klan and reformed the government's Indian policy.

In his farewell address, Grant said, "It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without previous political training. . . . Mistakes have been made, as all can see, and I admit."

He told a reporter, "I was never as happy in my life as the day I left the White House."

Still just 55, he spent two years on a world tour amid adoring throngs. He visited Europe, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, China and Japan.

As Waugh recounts in her book, the German leader Otto von Bismarck said to Grant that it was a shame that the United States had to endure so terrible a war. Grant answered, "But it had to be done."

Bismarck: "Yes, you had to save the Union."

Grant: "Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery."

He finally returned home, arriving in San Francisco to a parade and fireworks. About 350,000 people honored him with a parade in Philadelphia. Then he lost almost everything in a financial swindle. He wrote magazine articles for money and decided to write his autobiography. (Mark Twain's new company published the two volumes, offering an excellent royalty arrangement, but Twain did not, as some mistakenly think, write a word of the memoirs.)

The historian White notes, "He had a remarkable ability to use strong verbs, which are action words, and the ability not to use adjectives and almost no adverbs." On the battlefield, White said, "those who received the orders knew exactly what they were supposed to do. This is no small thing."

Grant raced to finish the memoirs before throat cancer could silence him. The country learned of his grave illness and followed daily reports of his condition. He finished just in time, and the memoirs were hugely popular. He died July 23, 1885, at the age of 63.

Frederick Douglass eulogized Grant as "a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior."

Waugh's book on Grant recounts a scene in the 1936 Frank Capra movie, "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," in which the protagonist, Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), visits Grant's Tomb.

A cynical newspaper reporter asks him what he sees.

He answers, "I see a small Ohio farm boy becoming a great soldier. I see thousands of marching men. I see General Lee with a broken heart, surrendering, and I can see the beginning of a new nation, like Abraham Lincoln said. And I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as president. Things like that can only happen in a country like America."

In 2013, according to the National Park Service, 83,400 people visited Grant's Tomb, a drop of 9,000 from the previous year.

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Why don't people remember much of anything about the Civil War general who saved the Union?

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The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial is the Lost Monument of Washington. It might as well be invisible. No one knows it's there. Its location is actually spectacular, right at the foot of Capitol Hill, at the opening to the Mall.

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A Photograph Of Me While I Was In The War

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A Photograph Of Me While I Was In The War

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With a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant out by the man who helped put Alexander Hamilton back in the center of 21st American popular culture, I'm late to the game to sing Grant's praises. I have not read Chernow's book. But I have been rereading Grant's memoirs. I began writing this post at the end of last year when the valorization of Confederate military leaders was more at the center of our public debate. But these are issues of long standing, going on two centuries. They remain as present and consequential as they've ever been and Grant is at the center of that.

Until relatively recently Grant, at least as President, had a poor historical reputation. His strengths as a military leader were also overshadowed in the popular imagination by Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and others. But in both cases, much of Grant's dim reputation was directly tied to the way national unity was built in the late 19th century on the abandonment of the country's newly freed African-American citizens and what we might call the Union theory of the war itself. I have always found it notable that the official records of what we call the Civil War, published by the US government are entitled The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.

We've noted in other posts how the Confederate statues that dot the South today aren't actually from the post-Civil War Era. Most date from decades later when they were erected as celebrations of the triumph of Jim Crow and the restoration of 'home rule' in the South. In 1915 D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, perhaps the first American movie blockbuster, portrayed the Reconstruction Era as one in which northern extremists, corrupt politicians and barbarous and sexually aggressively African-Americans tyrannized Southern whites until they were liberated with the help of the original Ku Klux Klan. If that was the dominant historical memory of Reconstruction - and it was in the early 20th century - the reputation of the man whose battlefield victories made it possible and who presided over it as President necessarily had to suffer.

But Grant is one of the great actors on the stage of American history: first as a general, second as President, and third as the author of what is likely the only great work of literature ever written by American President, his Personal Memoirs.

This is all the more remarkable since the Memoirs are Grant's only piece of public writing (with the exception of a couple short magazine articles he wrote just before the Memoirs) and he wrote most of the second volume in the final weeks of his life as he was dying of cancer. He finished editing the manuscript five days before he died.

From the first page, Grant's writing is stark and direct. We are reading the words of the North's great military hero of the Civil War as well as a two-term President eight years after leaving office. In his preface, he tells us that while he had always insisted he would never write his memoirs or anything for publication he has agreed to do so because he is broke and dying. We are on notice from the outset that he is a man with no airs. "I consented for the money it gave me; for at that moment I was living upon borrowed money." Grant's basic humility is an element of his personality that is present on almost every page. As is often the case in life, this humility is joined with a deep capacity for empathy. Here it is combined with, perhaps indistinguishable from, an account which is free of conceits or personal myth-making. On hearing hostile gunfire for the first time during the Mexican-American war he tells us: "What General Taylor's feelings were during this suspense I do not know; but for myself, a young second-lieutenant who had never heard a hostile gun before, I felt sorry that I had enlisted." The first sentence of the Memoirs marks a central theme in a single sentence of stacked clauses which capture the ordered vigor of Grant's writing: "My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral."

Lee may have glamor and impeccable pedigree. He was a highly skilled general. But he was no innovator. Grant turns out to have been a military genius - something that must have been hard to predict given his solid but unexceptional service in the Army prior to the Civil War. Having retired from the military as a captain in 1854 he hesitates at first to suggest for himself the rank of colonel as Illinois is creating volunteer regiments. In three years he is Lt. General with command of the entire Union Army. Defending Grant from charges of drunkenness (likely unfounded or exaggerated in this case) when he was first gaining attention in the Western theater, Lincoln famously said of him, "I can't spare this man; he fights."

Lincoln was right. Grant knew that the war would not be won by preparation or winning battles but by conquering territory and destroying or capturing armies. One of the richest parts of Grant's battlefield accounts is that we see him learning by practice. Grant's great innovation was a new kind of highly mobile warfare, sometimes called 'maneuver warfare.' But again we see him learning by doing. Grant also realized the inherently political nature of battlefield questions, especially for a democracy. Narrowly military considerations cannot be understood or evaluated apart from the public need for victories which dictates the morale on which the whole war effort is sustained.

There are two campaigns which propelled Grant to command of the entire Union Army: Vicksburg (Mississippi) and Chattanooga (Tennessee). The second was the more dramatic result. The first brings together each of the pieces of Grant's emerging greatness, strategic insight, and tactical experience. Vicksburg was the one major Confederate possession which denied the Union army unimpeded control of the entirety of the Mississippi River, a critical inward waterway which, if held by federal forces, would cut the Confederacy in two. Grant spent months devising and then executing a series of maneuvers that would finally allow him to lay siege to and finally conquer the city. As these efforts unfolded there were key points at which all accepted military doctrine dictated a temporary withdrawal of forces. This Grant refused to do because he realized that war weariness in the North, illustrated by declining enlistments and a bad midterm election showing in 1862, could not bear even tactical retreats, even militarily justified ones. The North needed victories to keep up the fight.

This political insight was coupled with Grant's other great breakthrough: mobility. Civil War-era armies were large, highly organized formations, with extensive supply lines connecting them to their sources of food and ammunition in their own territory. The need to maintain and protect these supply lines necessarily limited mobility. In other campaigns down the Mississippi during the first two years of the war, Grant had increasingly recognized the importance of mobility and maintaining the initiative in winning battles. Faced with a critical choice during the Vicksburg campaign, Grant put himself on the wrong side of all conventional wisdom by cutting himself off from his supply line and placing himself deep into enemy territory with a major river and the enemy army between him and his own territory and sources of supply.

This wasn't theory but the result of practice, experiment, and necessity. "It should be remembered that at the time I speak of it had not been demonstrated that an army could operate in an enemy's territory depending upon the country for supplies." Again a short time later: "I was amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded. It showed that we could have subsisted off the country for two months instead of two weeks without going beyond the limits designated. This taught me a lesson which was taken advantage of later in the campaign when our army lived twenty days with the issue of only five days' rations by the commissary. Our loss of supplies was great at Holly Springs, but it was more than compensated for by those taken from the country and by the lesson taught."

Sherman, then a subordinate general under Grant's command, was the more dashing figure and would later be more associated with the form of highly mobile warfare he and Grant pioneered in the Western theater. But here he pressed Grant on the folly of his decision. What Grant was coming to realize was the degree to which he could abandon his supply lines and have his armies live off the land itself. Being cut off in this way involved great risk. But in warfare, increased mobility reaches a point where it ceases to be an incremental or quantitative advantage and becomes a qualitative and transformational difference.

A century later, a military intellectual and US Air Force Colonel named John Boyd developed a theory of military operations known by the shorthand "OODA loops." OODA stands for the process of Observe - Orient - Decide - Act, a framework to think about the constant interaction between our observation of our environment and the decisions we make in how to respond to it. Boyd's insight was that if a combatant can move through this cycle sufficiently faster than an adversary he can get inside his opponent's 'OODA loops'. Specifically, if you can move rapidly enough from observation to decision and action, you can change the environment your opponent has observed while they are still deciding how to react to it.That causes a cycle of missteps and confusion leading to defeat. Boyd, a fighter pilot, developed his theory around aviation dogfights. But without the acronyms, game theory and mathematics, it was a similar insight that was allowing Grant to see the impact of mobility in defeating his opponents. Speed is not simply the pace at which actions occur. Sufficient speed changes the nature of those actions or, more specifically, changes the reactions to them and in so doing changes them as well.

I've given a lot of thought to where this came from, Grant's skill and insight. Humility and deliberateness are more constant themes of his writing than daring or aggression. The answer must rest in clarity, an ability to see all the different factors in a military situation (which are not only military but tied to morale and a larger political context) and an ability to act on that ability to see and comprehend all of the moving parts. This must all be tied to the quality of his writing which, as I noted, is even more unexpected than his generalship.

The essence of all good writing is clarity. Style seems like a separate attribute of good writing. But it's not. Style is really just a byproduct of clarity and concision. It is the personality or other uniqueness of the writer coming through on the page because they write clearly.

So how does one write clearly? The writing is the easier part of it. Once you know precisely what you mean to say, writing it is usually straightforward if not always easy. At least 90% of poor writing stems from the writer not knowing exactly what it is they mean to say. We're all lazy like this. Half-formed thoughts pop into our heads and we push them out as words that have some relation to the hazy ideas and feelings in our minds. This may do in talking to your coworker or spouse about simple topics over the course of the day. The points are simple. In speaking we have physical cues and intonation. If you're not clear the first time you can try again.

Writing is different. If you are writing it down the ideas must be significant or else you wouldn't be writing them down. You only have one shot to make your meaning clear. There is no follow-on interaction to fill in the gaps. Often what you mean to say is still more a feeling than a thought or a not fully worked through set of ideas and connections between them. Jargon and vaguenesses are added to the mix to cover spots in the writer's thinking that aren't clear in their own head. Or they paper over things the writer means but is not ready to say.

Take a wordy or clumsy sentence you may write. Examine it and you will almost always see that it is wordy or clumsy because the idea is unclear in your head. Fuzzy parts of your thinking, connections that don't fully bear out or don't connect in a clear way end up on the page in fuzzy or vague groupings of words. If you work at the idea in your head long enough that you know exactly what it is, precisely how one idea or action connects to the idea or actions that came before and after it, the language can be direct, brisk and clear. It all but writes itself ... once you know precisely what you mean to say. Absent that clarity it never can because the language you use to express your ideas can never be clearer than the ideas or thoughts as they exist in your mind. Work over the ideas, how each connects to each other, the order and progression that connects them and the words will, largely, take care of themselves.

Clarity is simply taking the meaning in the writer's head and conveying it as clearly as possible in words. This kind of directness is the power and force driving Grant's Memoirs. They are important to read because what he describes is incredibly important - in national terms, in military terms, in terms of everything that is and was involved in the Civil War. We also get a clear sense of the man. How did he come to this? I think he tells us, albeit obliquely, perhaps even not entirely consciously (though that lack of awareness I tend to doubt.)

Early in Memoirs Grant describes Zachary Taylor, the general who commanded him in the Mexican-American War and later a President who died in office. Comparing him with the more voluble and polished Winfield Scott, Grant writes this.

Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words, but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences.

Grant here could have been talking about himself. Perhaps he was. The sentence has all the lucidity and concision it describes. The point is important. Especially before the advent of electronic communications, a General must be clear in his communication and commands. "He could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it." This is something we can all aspire to and a goal few of us realize. Again, for a general of that era who must send precise instructions and commands out into the hands of messengers and couriers and sometimes spies and have them understood in their specifics and understood in the same way by different people - this is critical. Grant thought Taylor had this ability. Grant did as well. He must have cultivated it in a similar fashion since this was Grant's only true experience as a writer: as a writer of reports, commands, dispositions and so forth. Again, the need for clarity, the ability to see all the moving parts, to think through their interconnections and then communicate about them clearly.

Part of the effect of the valorization of not only the Confederacy but Confederate generals is that Union generals remain a kind of historical blank. They got the job done. But there's not much to say about him. One reason for the extreme valorization of Lee is that all could see, basically from the beginning, that Jefferson Davis was a pedestrian and unremarkable figure. Lee was elevated as the South's answer to the emerging cult of Lincoln. Grant is the other remarkable figure of the Civil War, not just a great military leader and writer and President but a man who was central to the continuation and successes of Reconstruction through 1877. His politics and values are not only not poisonous as Lee's were but are as close to those we embrace today as the nature of the time can allow. Yet his grave - Grant's Tomb in New York City - had by the middle of the 20th century fallen into disrepair, covered in graffiti and occupied by drug dealers. (It has now been largely restored.) This is history we should embrace, ideals and perseverance and creativity in which we can see some of our best selves.

I'm sure Chernow's book is great. It's flying off the shelves. But do not miss the Memoirs. They are for the ages.

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Thoughts on the Greatness of Ulysses S. Grant

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With a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant out by the man who helped put Alexander Hamilton back in the center of 21st American popular culture, I'm late to the game to sing Grant's praises. I have not read Chernow's book. But I have been rereading Grant's memoirs.

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How Did The Civil War Shape Your Life? If You Could Go Back, Would You Still Have Joined The Fight?

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How Did The Civil War Shape Your Life? If You Could Go Back, Would You Still Have Joined The Fight?

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I do not regret joining the war because I do believe fighting for my county is was my calling was and that thats what I was made to do, so coming to fight in the Civil war was just helping me help the country. Also, before the war, although my performances on the battle field were almost always spectacular, I was always the jokester or the one that gets into a little bit of trouble. But sense I had so much practice being commander through out the war, it gave me lots of ways to prove that I wass a good leader, and I do believe that if it hadn't been for the war, I would have never been elected president just 4 short years after the war was over.