Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [3]
The fact that Grant gave the amount of thought that he did to his memorial is surprising, given his reputation for being unassuming, slovenly in personal appearance, modest, and easily put upon—modern biographers love to contrast Lee in his dress uniform, sash, and ornate sword at Appomattox with Grant, riding up late, mud-spattered and swordless in his “private’s uniform,” with only the shoulder bars bearing his three stars to distinguish him from an ordinary soldier—but like so much about Grant, this is a misleading image. Contemporary photographs of Grant certainly make it clear that he was not a “dressy” general, but he seldom wore a private’s uniform. He seems to have favored a kind of dark blue suit, with a long coat and a waistcoat, bearing the gilt buttons of the U.S. Army and the regulation shoulder boards—a uniform, in fact, not unlike the one Lee generally wore except on ceremonial occasions, except that Lee’s was gray. Certainly Grant did not usually wear a sword, but neither did Lee, who wore his at Appomattox only because he thought it would be his obligation to hand it over to Grant as a token of surrender.
This is, in fact, part of a widespread failure to understand Grant’s character, which was admittedly complex and always, to some degree, secretive. With Lee what you saw was what you got—he was a proud, patrician officer, a beau sabreur, a born commander who expected to be obeyed. With Grant what you saw was what he wanted you to see—a plain, ordinary man with no pretensions to gentility or military glamour. But in truth Grant never saw himself as “plain” or “ordinary,” and was always intensely conscious of his rank, his social position, and his gifts as a commander. Grant’s black slouch hat, his omnipresent cigar, and his muddy boots are not so much a pose, like Ike’s not wearing his medal ribbons on his uniform jacket, or Monty’s affecting a beret, baggy corduroy trousers, and a sweater even as a field marshal, but rather a simple lack of interest in military niceties, a fierce concentration on the business of war—which is winning—rather than the display of war, which seemed to him a waste of time and energy.
It is no surprise that Grant suffered from that most unwarlike of maladies, migraine headaches—he worried about every detail, nothing he did as a general was casual, everything was meticulously calculated and thought out to bring about victory. Like the Duke of Wellington, Grant did not share his plans with his subordinates (or even with the president); he concentrated on a plan, worked it out in his head, fretted over the smallest details of supply and logistics, then waited (he would not be pushed, pressured, or hurried) for the right moment to put it into effect. As for Grant’s taste for plain uniforms, it is worth remembering that although Wellington was an aristocrat and had himself painted innumerable times in the full uniform of a British field marshal with all his orders and decorations, he wore a plain dark frock coat and black cocked hat at Waterloo, with no gold lace or decorations. Grant was far from the only great general in history who had more on his mind than his appearance.
All the same, one of the qualities that comes across loud and clear in any account of Grant’s life is his touchiness. It was not a question of vanity or personal pride so much as the fear on the part of a man who had always been underestimated as a boy and looked down on by people who assumed they were better than he was.
Grant,