Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [0]
The Unlikely Hero
Michael Korda
For Margaret, with love—
and for Christopher Lord, Roger Cooper, and Russell Taylor,
in memory of Budapest, October–November 1956
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.
—Henry V, ACT 4, SCENE 3
Contents
Epigraph
Chapter One
IN THE SUMMER OF 2003 Ulysses S. Grant made news…
Chapter Two
GRANT’S VIRTUES—his reserve, his quiet determination, his courage in the…
Chapter Three
IN ENGLAND THERE WAS a vast social gulf between cavalry…
Chapter Four
GRANT HAD WAITED a long time to marry Julia, and…
Chapter Five
GRANT MAY HAVE BEEN a colonel, but he still had…
Chapter Six
NO SOONER DID GRANT have what he wanted—or appeared to…
Chapter Seven
GRANT ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON on March 8, 1864—the last time…
Chapter Eight
MANY BIOGRAPHERS of Grant have suggested that his career after…
Chapter Nine
IN 1877 RETIRING PRESIDENTS did not have the benefits that…
Chapter Ten
RUINED AND SADDLED WITH DEBT, Grant was, in some respects,…
Epilogue: Why Grant?
Notes
About the Author
Other Books by Michael Korda
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
I read but few lives of great men because biographers do not, as a rule, tell enough about the formative period of life. What I want to know is what a man did as a boy.
—ULYSSES S. GRANT
Eminent Lives, brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively form, from Plutarch’s Lives to Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar. “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” wrote Strachey: “That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.”
FORTHCOMING BOOKS IN THE EMINENT LIVES SERIES
Norman F. Cantor on Alexander the Great
Robert Gottlieb on George Balanchine
Paul Johnson on George Washington
Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Jefferson
Edmund Morris on Ludwig van Beethoven
Francine Prose on Caravaggio
Joseph Epstein on Alexis de Tocqueville
Peter Kramer on Sigmund Freud
Karen Armstrong on Muhammad
Bill Bryson on William Shakespeare
GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS
Chapter One
IN THE SUMMER OF 2003 Ulysses S. Grant made news all across the country that he had, in his lifetime, done so much to reunite: Some of his descendants, a good part of the more serious press, and the Grant Monument Association objected strongly to pop diva Beyoncé Knowles, accompanied by a “troupe of barely clad dancers,” using his tomb in New York City’s Riverside Park as the background for a raucous, “lascivious,” nationally televised July Fourth concert.1
Beyoncé and her fans hardly seemed aware of who Grant was, or why such a fuss should be made about the presence of loud music, suggestive dancing, partial nudity, and a huge, boisterous crowd in front of his tomb, which, as the New York Times pointed out, had once been a bigger tourist attraction than the Statue of Liberty. In fact, except for a few members of the Grant family who had been trying for years to get the bodies of General Grant and his wife, Julia, removed from the tomb on the grounds that it had been allowed to fall into a disgraceful state of repair and decay, the level of public indignation was low. The Times even felt compelled to comment rather sniffily that the general was “no longer the immensely famous figure he once was.” Grant’s great-grandson Chapman Foster Grant, fifty-eight, however, took a different view of Beyoncé’s concert, commenting, “Who knows? If the old guy were alive, he might have liked it.”
Knowing as much as we do about the general’s relationship with Mrs. Grant—like President Lincoln, whom he much admired, Grant was notoriously devoted to a wife who