REMEMBERING GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT.

• Author: Abrahamson, James L.

REMEMBERING GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT

By Jean Edward Smith, author of Grant and other biographies

https://www.fpri.org/articles/2013/05/let-us-have-peace-remembering-general-ulysses-s-grant

Before turning to Grant alone, professor Smith began his speech to a conference of the Butcher History Institute with an insightful comparison of the qualities of Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower as both generals and presidents, offering as ell an explanation for their post-presidential fall and recent rise in their reputations.

Listeners next learn that Grant was a reluctant soldier who hated his years as a West Point cadet. Assigned to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, he soon married and fought successfully in the Mexican War under two generals--Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott--whom he greatly admired and from whom he learned much that shaped his behavior in the Civil War. Next, however, the army assigned Grant, without his wife, to posts on Lake Ontario and the Pacific coast, where he became bored, drank too much, and resigned his commission as preferable to a humiliating court martial.

A failure as a civilian as he had been in the peacetime frontier army, Grant sought to regain his regular commission following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Disappointed, he settled for a colonelcy in the Illinois militia. A string of victories--Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga--in the war's Western Theater led to...