American History Hit - Ulysses S. Grant & the Civil War

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Strategic brilliance? Relentless determination? Unbeatable leadership and cooperation with Lincoln? How did Ulysses S. Grant distinguish himself in the Civil War?Don speaks to Cecily Zander, a historian specializing in the Civil War era and the American West. Together, they discuss Grant's rise to General, his role in the war and why he has been known as 'the Butcher'.Produced by Freddy Chick and Charlotte Long. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. There's a famous scene in May 1864, not long after Ulysses S. Grant has been named General in chief of the armies of the United States. Grant and his troops are in Virginia,

marching out of the thickly wooded region known as the wilderness. The day before, they fought to a costly standoff against Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee. Smoke from wildfires blows across their path as the column reaches a fork in the road and comes to a halt. The left branch of the road will take them northward across a river, away from Lee's army. The right heads towards Lee and onward south to Richmond. To this point in the war, Union commanders were known to be cautious to a fault, especially after defeats. This new man has a bolder reputation from hard-won victories further west.

But this is Virginia and the legendary Lee. What will this new general do? Will he go left or right? Grant rides through the ranks towards the fork in the road, and without pause, reigns his horse to the right. The troops spontaneously cheer, throwing caps in the air, even breaking into song as they resume the march. For the first time in three and a half drawn out years of brutal combat,

they finally have a leader who means to take the fight to the rebels. Despite their losses, despite their exhaustion. They want their shot at Lee. And General Ulysses S. Grant means to give it to them. Good day, all. Welcome to another episode of American History Hit. Today, we tell the tale of Ulysses S. Grant. Such a vastness is this Ohioan's life in times

that we've tried to be sensible and divide it into two parts. First, his military service through the Civil War, and second in another episode, those of his presidency. For today, it's Grant, the fighter, and war. or hero. A lackluster graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point finished 21st out of 39 in his class. Grant would serve 23 years in the Army in two iterations 1839 to 54, including the Mexican-American War. Then after a seven-year spell in civilian life landed in the Civil War, battling his way across the south, upward through the ranks,

eventually named General of the Army of the United States, one of only three generals who attained this highest rank, John Pershing and George Washington being the other two. A career crammed with unlikely turns and skids and near crashes, Ulysses S. Grant gives hope to underachievers everywhere. Given a righteous cause, proper resources, and a willingness to push the limits, perhaps we too could preserve the union and advance our nation's noblest ideals. We are joined today by Civil War historian Ceciliesander of Texas Women's University in Denton. Go boldly! where she teaches American history, memory, and popular culture. Her book, The Army Under Fire, Anti-Militarism in the Civil War era,

was only just published in February 2004. Hello, Cecily. Welcome to American History. Good of you to be here. Hey, thanks, Don. I'm really happy to be here. Somehow, I have been a fan of Ulysses Grant since I was a kid. Something about those unbuttoned Civil War photographs impressed me so. But I am one of many who've accepted the myths and rumors about the man that circulated for more than a century. We are living through an era of Grant redemption, aren't we?

Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the C-SPAN presidential rankings polls, which my students mock me for doing regularly, you can see that Grant used to be below average, well below the middle. And he's now come up. He's in the top half. And I think it's only going to get better for him as time goes on here. We'll do our part today. Hiram Ulysses Grant was his name, not Ulysses S.

We'll discuss that in a moment. Born Georgetown, Ohio 1822, raised by, a father who ran a tannery business comes from patriotic stock. Great grandfather fought for the English and French and Indian War. Then a grandfather, Bunker Hill. Hiram Ulysses, oldest of six, two brothers, three sisters. I care about this stuff because I'm the youngest of four sisters, and it matters psychologically where you fall in this. So he's the oldest. Ulysses distinguished himself at a young age by his horsemanship. Big part of his biography, really, isn't it? He loved horses, and he set jumping records at West Point when he got there.

He was not the biggest guy. He was not the tallest guy. He was not necessarily the strongest, but he was great with horses. And he set records that stood for decades. And in the Civil War, there are multiple stories of men seeing him in and around camp. If he saw horses or animals being mistreated, like, woe unto you if you were the guy mistreating the horse because you were going to get told. One of his attributes that I think emerges in the story we're about to tell is the empathy of the man. And I think you can't, you know, anyone who cares about animals in general, but certainly horses

has to have that kind of nature. And that certainly is part of Grant. He attends West Point, as I said, 1839. This is a famous misnomer around his name. This is where we tell this story. Explain it, please. Where's the S come from? So he was appointed as all cadets were at that time by a congressman, usually, you know,

a friend of the family. And they got his name wrong because his whole family called him Ulysses. No one called him Hiram. And this congressman assumed that his middleman, name must be his mother's maiden name. Just put an S. Wasn't sure. So Grant shows up at West Point. They said, welcome. We have you down. Ulysses S. Grant. And he was five feet tall and he weighed about 100 pounds. And he was too afraid to tell them no. Or they weren't going to listen to him if he did. And so he just kind of went with it. And I think it probably worked out in the end. A general with

the initials hug, a lot less intimidating than one with the initials US. That's good. That becomes the acronym for unconditional surrender and Uncle Sam. I mean, it sure is useful. Does he officially change it? I always wonder, we always see it. Ulysses S. Grant. I think he just went with it. I don't know if he ever sort of had it written into the record, though, to be honest,

but if I was named Hiram, I would probably try to find any way out of that as well, so I don't blame him. He really goes through a transformation at West Point. On one hand, as I say, not a great performer in the academic sense, but he's well-liked. Spence his West Point years in the company of several few. future officers of the Confederacy. This is one of the oddest little pockets of American history, isn't it, when you consider the implications. One of his best pals is James Longstreet Street, who will be faced off by me at Gettysburg. I mean, this guy is a huge general in the Confederacy.

He's in Grant's wedding party. Yeah, they're really good buddies. And remember, Grant was from a part of Ohio that sort of because of the rivers and because of the way commerce worked in the 19th century, he was not immune to slavery or slaveholding growing up as a young person in Ohio. You would have seen it on a daily basis. It would have been a normal part of his life. And so he would not have necessarily taken a negative attitude towards slavery or slaveholders. And the idea behind West Point was to kind of nationalize these cadets, to not make them northerners or southerners, but to make them kind of patriotic Americans.

And so I don't think it's that surprising, but Longstreet, who will famously become a turncoat to the lost cause and kind of reject that Confederate narrative of the war will become a Republican after the war and Grant will reward him during his presidency with several kind of political patronage appointments, including making Longstreet the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire of all things. He deserves an episode unto himself, really does. All that being said, Grant's father was a strict abolitionist. And the fact that Grant marries Julia Dent down in Missouri, whose father is an enslaver, and this becomes a big split in the family, doesn't it? Yeah, and Grant sort of accepts that he's marrying to a slaveholding family.

There's, you know, there's some sort of question about this, but we certainly think at one point he was given enslaved people by his father-in-law to help work on one of the several failed farms he starts in the 1850s once he leaves the army. But Grant had no kind of great attachment to slavery, but again, I think maybe, I don't know. I've never been married, but happy wife, happy life. It's what I hear people say. That's right. I can attest. He becomes this real family man. Again, the empathy note. He has four children with Julia. But the military life obviously is a stress on all of that. Then along comes the Mexican-American War. I mean, I'm getting the events out of order here, but he really goes all in on this war,

distinguishes himself big time, a number of battles. Without getting too much into the weeds on the Mexican-American, I encourage people to listen to another episode of ours that we've done this one. What does Grant take away from his time in Mexico? He's a quartermaster, right? I mean, he learns about supply lines a lot. Yeah, he does, which is going to be really important, and how he conceives of several operations that he will directly, both directly and indirectly oversee. When he becomes General of the Union armies, he's in the fortunate position in Mexico

of getting to serve under the kind of two great commanders of that war. So he serves first under Zachary Taylor. And then when Taylor is starting to get too successful and maybe threatening James K. Polk's political security, and Winfield Scott is put in command. Grant is transferred to Scott. And Grant's members are great on this. He has a whole sort of really robust chapter on the war with Mexico, which he calls a wicked war. He does think that it was not necessarily the United States most sort of righteous conflict. He does see it as a land grab and potentially a pro-slavery won at that. But I think he takes more in terms of how he comports himself from Zachary Taylor, who was much more down-to-earth,

casual, kind of a man of the people. But he certainly takes his ambition and audacity from Scott. I mean, Scott's campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City, marching overland, amphidious landing at Veracruz, cutting himself loose, going overland. It's the template for things like Sherman's March to the Sea, which Grant will help plan, and certainly the Overland campaign, which Grant himself will execute in the spring of 1864. So I think he learns from both of those guys and wisely takes their kind of best elements, each of their best elements, into his own personality. There's a lot of, I mean, amateur historian as myself talks about the civil war as being the beginning of modern warfare, really. And Grant is one of the big practitioners of how to use

artillery and so forth. But a lot of that actually starts in the Mexican-American War, doesn't it? I mean, that's where these guys kind of invent this new way of fighting a war. And Grant's right in the of it. As is Robert E. Lee. So it should be no surprise to us that when those two get down to facing each other, and, you know, I think by the time they do, everyone thinks, well, this is how it's going to end. It's Grant versus Lee. It's the Battle of Titans. They were both in Scott's army there and both playing a huge part in making that operation successful. The expansion of Grant's worldview is important to take away from this. Not only does he see the effect internationally that the United States has on this part of the world, for sure,

but also he sees the flaws with his own country. I mean, he sees, he's able to reflect on, as you explained, the causes of this and the provocations of it. You know, he kind of becomes a more mature individual through this, I think. When he gets home from the military, this is when I spoke of the pressures on family and so forth. He's not a happy man. I mean, he ends up out west and all over the place. And this is when he starts to self-medicate. I guess he's dealing with depression.

I don't really know what the source of it is. but he very famously begins to drink, and this becomes an event that actually really defines his life. He is given, well, tell me about how this plays out. Well, he's in the Pacific Northwest, so this is really the far edge of the world. If you're in the United States and the early 1850s, and it's very lonely. There's maybe a few other guys, and he's a junior officer, so he doesn't necessarily have the privilege to bring his wife and family with him, nor would he want to. It wasn't necessarily safe enough for him to do so. And I encourage listeners, if they want to read some of the most kind of touching and beautiful letters written between a couple in the 19th century United States,

Ulysses Grant and Julia Grant's letters to one another are just wonderful, and they're included in many editions of his memoirs. But they had such a deep connection. Grant, I think that depression really stem from being away from his family. And it's back to that kind of deep sense of sort of attachment. to people and loyalty that Grant had, and he wanted to be with his family, and he starts to drink, and the people around him notice. Again, he was not unique in this,

but I think he had a particularly, maybe boisterous personality when he did so. But, I mean, to his great credit, he's the one who pulls the plug. He says, I can't keep going on like this. And so he comes into the war with this, you know, he left the old army under these circumstances of being, you know, a drunk and a failure.

But I think people understood, or at least other soldiers, understood. But it becomes an easy way to discredit him later and gets added to this kind of roster of his faults for those who are looking to maybe challenge his success. Yeah, he is not kicked out. He resigns from the army. He's given an ultimatum by his commanding officer, you know, either give this up or get out. And he owns up to the fact that he's been drinking, and he resigns and goes back to his family. But after he leaves the war, where's he go. He hands up back in business with his family, doesn't he? He does. He tries to start a couple of

farms on his own. He gets some land once as a gift from his father-in-law, another farm called hard scrabble, which gives you an indication of how difficult he found it. I mean, he did not take naturally to farming. He was a trained soldier, and he ends up working for his family in a tannery, and he hated this. He was, he hated the smell of it. I think any of us would. I don't think a tannery in 1858 would have smelled particularly lovely. And so he's absolutely miserable. And he's a failure. He's a failure in every sort of enterprise he started. And even though his career as a soldier was distinguished, he failed. He left the army. His career as a farmer's failed. And he can't even get his own business running. So Grant at 1860 in the secession winter does

not sort of cut a figure that we would immediately have pointed to him and said, that is going to be the man who leads the union to victory. In fact, it would have been unthinkable that he would be that guy. You're right. I mean, in the reading I did for this, there was one image of him, I believe it's in St. Louis,

selling firewood on a street corner. And this is the man who will, in just a matter of a few short weeks, will be the number one general in the country. It's an incredible turnaround when you consider. But really, it's, I think, a very strong indication of how much this man needed the structure of the military, didn't he? He needed to serve a greater cause than himself.

Left to his own devices, despite it being a very sweet family man, apparently, he really didn't have the passion that he shows for this greater cause. It's so fascinating, isn't it? Yeah, and it's funny, when he is within that structure, he flourishes. I would assume you'll talk about this when you come to grant as president. Politics is not as structured, and he struggles a bit more to know who to trust and know who to rely on without the security of knowing that everyone in the army, that's your teammate. They're polling for the same cause as you. And he didn't really understand that in politics, that's not always the case. And so it may be just a flag going forward. It's a problem for him. So the civil war comes along when he's working for his brother

in Galena, Illinois. And so begins his service in the war, as for so many others. He is out west, as opposed to, say, McClellan back east and the Union Army and Virginia and so forth. This is all, you know, the waterways of the West that have to be won by the Union if you're going to sort of divide and conquer. His famous battles, Fort Henry Donaldson on the Tennessee. This leads to the Battle of Shiloh, which gets him a lot of attention. Shiloh is really where you begin to see the real Grant emerging. Can you explain how this shows in that combat? Sure. Shiloh's where Grant, yeah, I think really cuts his teeth.

He's facing Albert Sidney Johnston, who many in the Confederacy believe, is, and Jefferson Davis, among them, their best commander. Sydney Johnston is considered better than Lee. He was more experienced than Lee. You know, Jefferson Davis thought, you know, Sydney Johnson was really going to be the guy to win the war for the Confederacy. And it's key that Davis sticks Sydney Johnson out west, because it also shows them, you know, I think when we narrate the Civil War, we put so much focus on Virginia because of the

personalities who were there. But both Lincoln and Davis really thought the West was critical for those reasons you mentioned, those waterways controlling the Mississippi River. I meant controlling commerce. It controlled every avenue into the Confederacy, the Ohio River, the Tennessee River, they all flow into Confederate territory. And at Shiloh, Grant for the first time, shows what Lincoln is going to later identify as his kind of bulldog quality. The first day isn't going to go super great for the union at Shiloh. And there's a famous, if apocryphal conversation between Grant and Sherman,

who are already kind of solidifying their great partnership, where Sherman says to him at the end of the first day's fighting, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we, Grant? And Grant says something like, yeah, whip him tomorrow, though. He's not worried about it. He's not worried that he can't turn it around. And where a lot of Civil War officers fail is exactly at that point, where they are losing,

and they are so worried about what they're, their opponent is going to do, they become paralyzed with inaction. That never happened to Grant. And Sherman puts his finger on it. He said, Grant, never worried about what the enemy was doing. He only worried about what he was doing. And it's at Shiloh, where he really shows that quality. He doesn't care what the Confederates are doing. He just knows he's got a plan and he's going to execute it. So from Shiloh, I mean, my main takeaway is how willing this guy is to see past day one, as you mentioned. and in a bigger sense to see the big picture at all times, which, you know, I was not in the military. I cannot imagine how hard that is in any day or an age, much less the Civil War, to really

understand how this whole thing plays out in a bigger sense. It's an extraordinary and genius capability he has. Yeah. And again, there are a lot of men who are going to be very successful in the Civil War, but only one of them is going to be Liz's grant. So he had it to a degree that, that very few others did. And I think the best generals in the Union Army recognized that in Grant and were willing to row the boat behind him. And then the, and others were frustrated and envious and jealous of it. And they were less willing to sort of help out. But the ones who got it, got it.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. The big turning point of the war in so many ways is July 4, 1863. more famously for Gettysburg, but equally so really for Vicksburg, but that gets less attention. Vicksburg was the siege that went on for a long time that Grant was central in creating. And this was really the breaking the back on the Mississippi River and owning the West as far as the union was concerned. But boy, is it gnarly, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And so just to kind of zoom out, your listeners will sort of have heard about Winfield Scott's Anaconda plan. So this involves a blockade of the Confederate coast,

but also to complete that encircling of the Confederacy, you have to control the Mississippi River. And the United States gets New Orleans early in the war. Henry and Donaldson are critical for this, and Vicksburg is that last, kind of bastion. And so Grant knows he needs to get at it. The Confederacy, it's high on a bluff over the river. It's well defended.

Grant tries to get around it to the left. He tries to get around it to the right. He tries to come Overland. And then finally he says, I'm going to need to work with our brownwater navy, our riverine navy. I'm going to run the batteries at Vicksburg. I'm just going to shoot the river. I'm going to do it because it's the only way I can get around and invest the city with this siege. And he does it.

And it's incredibly successful, but it's audacity. It's a plan that very few other generals would have gone through with. It required Grant to trust another branch of the armed forces, which he did, which is, again, a wonderful indication of his willingness to use every resource he has. to bring kind of the full force of the union to bear on the Confederacy. And then the siege that he kind of undertakes and orchestrates at Vicksburg is destructive. It destroys much of the city. The residents of Vicksburg, the ones who do not flee, are actually taking to living in caves in the sides of the bluffs,

because the shelling is so constant. And Grant gets the city to surrender on the 4th of July, 1863. There are great newspaper reports, you know, the American flag flying over Vicksburg. again, Grant rides into the city. Again, he sort of has this knack for accepting these massive surrenders of Confederate troops, and it's such a wonderful image for the United States in 1863, which has had a string of really catastrophic defeats in Virginia at the hands of Robert Lee. The Battle of Chancellorsville in May of 1863 has humiliated the United States Army.

They've won a victory at Gettysburg, but they're not following that up. is being allowed to retreat back across the swollen Potomac River. All of the union's successes in this early part of the war are coming from the West, and they're coming at the hands of Ulysses Grant. And again, he's not afraid to do damage. That's not to say he's a monster, but he's willing to use those resources. Yeah, but that's what he will be painted as later on. That's the thing. Grant is the butcher becomes the propaganda.

Is there a turning point where he says, oh, I get it. This is the kind of war I have to fight? or is this just his nature and his instinct? I think this is him. He's this remarkable sort of growing with the war. So everyone on both sides kind of thought, well, we might fight one or two battles, and then it's going to be over.

No one in 1861 could have imagined the colossal effort that it was going to take to win this thing. And again, grants ability to quickly understand the curve of that scale increasing allows him to be very successful because a lot of officers

are going to be much more hesitant to take advantage of all those resources. And Grant's not at all. Grant's going to be one of the first officers, for example, who's willing to try black troops in combat because he's not afraid that they're going to fail. He's going to say they're a wonderful resource that we have. We should use them.

We should let them prove themselves. It can only help us if they succeed. And if they don't, then we haven't lost anything. Whereas others are going to say, I'm absolutely not going to let black troops be part of my army. Grant never takes that approach because he knows in a massive war, you need to use everything you have. And I think that's one of his great qualities. I wonder what book has been written about what he learned at West Point and how that was taught there because that'd be fascinating thing.

They were taught mostly about French military theory, weren't they? Yeah. Digging in and the engineering of all of that. Grant took to that like a duck in water, didn't he? He knew how to execute a siege. And yeah, that's the amazing thing about West Point. When Grant was there, they were bouncing back and forth between a four-year and a five-year course.

But you really only learned battlefield tactics in your last year. So you did three to four years of engineering school. It was the best engineering school in the country because the Army's primary job, because the Army was mostly a peacetime army, was to go out west and survey the railroad routes and the rivers and the bridges and to know how to do that. And that kind of engineering is critical to siege warfare.

And so they were very, very good at that. And so when the war in 1865 at Petersburg becomes trench warfare, that will be a kind of eerie preview of the First World War, it's again, no surprise. Because they're kind of engineering this kind of landscape to try and hold out against one another outside of Richmond. With the added element that he's fighting his classmates, they all know the same stuff. So he knows he's got to go an extra mile just to out with these guys, doesn't he? Exactly. November 1863, Grant is given control over the Western Union armies. He takes Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This is a big, big deal. This is a rail hub that cuts Atlanta off and begins, you know, everything that happens in that final phase. This is also when Lincoln begins to favor him strongly as the Union commander. Let's talk about the relationship between Lincoln and Grant. This is central to the war, obviously. Yeah, I think Lincoln, must have been so relieved when Ulysses S. Grant showed up in the war department because

Lincoln had had a fairly frustrating time with his Eastern generals, who were not a stellar roster. I mean, you have George McClellan, who is really great at organizing the Army of the Potomac, but is not willing to apply those resources to wage a hard war. McClellan is very conservative. His view is if you fight gently or if you fight conservatively, you might be able to compelled the Confederacy to come back. And Lincoln is so frustrated by this. He says, we have more than the Confederacy. We have more men.

We have more material. We have more food. We have more everything. Apply it. Crush them because we know how to do it. And McClellan won't do it. And so Lincoln and McClellan grow to hate each other over the course of the early part of the war. Sort of other highlights from the War in the East include John Pope, Joseph Hooker,

Ambrose Burnside, who basically slaughterers a third of the Union Army at Fredericksburg in December of 1862, Grant is not a guy who loses. Every battle he's fighting is a win, a win, a win, a win, and a win. And so, Lincoln knows that he has the qualities to be successful. What Lincoln needs to know is whether Grant is going to actually take the direction that Lincoln is going to give him, which is to just force the Confederacy into submission with all of the resources that I can give you. And Grant says, great, keep giving me stuff. And I'll do it. I'll just hang on, I'll hang on, I'll hang on. On a different episode, I learned something about Lincoln, that he was actually very learned in the tactics of war. He

moved up that curve pretty quickly. Yeah. I wonder if the same is true of Grant in terms of politics and the congressional, you know, machinations of how to fight a war back in D.C. Was he as interested in that as Lincoln was about war? Grant takes the position that as long as he is in a uniform, he is neutral politically. He is not either a Democrat or a Republican, which were the kind of two options at this time. He was a United States soldier, and the president was his commander in chief. He served whatever political party or political interest was in power, because that's how the founders design the government to work and how they intended the army to work within the government. But I think what Grant does understand about politics is that he doesn't need to get involved

to be a successful military officer. So his great political insight is let Lincoln handle the politics and all handle the army and together will win the war. But Grant certainly does know that as November of 1864 approaches, and the election that will give Lincoln a second term is coming up, certainly everything that he does on the battlefield is a contribution to Lincoln's cause. And Grant knows as well as anyone, because he can read the newspapers

and hear the chatter of the men in the ranks that re-electing Lincoln means continuing the prosecution of the war, whereas re-electing George McClellan, or electing George McClellan, who will run against Lincoln, potentially means a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. And I think Grant has too much invested by the spring of 1864 as that election is looming to want to see a man in power who will bring the war to an end. So Grant is going to design a campaign that Union armies across the map from Louisiana

up to his army in Virginia are going to execute. And the goal of that is going to be to chalk up enough victories to show that the union is winning the war, that they have the momentum by the fall of 1864 that Lincoln will be carried into a second term and they can bring the war to its culmination. Interesting. When Grant comes east, Lincoln gives him command of the Union armies. This is a big change even from the previous command that he's grown into. This is when he really makes his mark as you're talking in history. The Overland Campaign in Virginia, spring of 1864, relentless and costly, a grim tally on both sides. Worse of the war. Union casualties first eight days of this campaign, 30,000 men, 4,000 a day-ish. Total through the campaign, May 5th to June 15th,

60,000 casualties of the Union. This is really where Grant is covered by the press. This begins his whole reputation as this butcher Mary Lincoln herself says not fit to be the head of the army. How much was this shaped by the press versus the fact? It's a great question. And it's the first time the Overland campaign is remarkable in a number of ways. Those six weeks that you're talking about, there's not going to be a lull in fighting. Because even as the armies are moving, they're firing at one another. And so in terms of American warfare and the American experience of combat, this is something utterly new. You're under constant fire for six weeks, the stress and the president.

is just mounting. And Grant has never been exposed to the media in this way. He's now in the kind of central ring. He's in the big fight against Robert Ely, and that's your key there. Perception versus reality. If you look at Grant's casualties in his Western campaigns, those fights at Shiloh, which, you know, when it happens, bloodiest battle in American history will quickly be surpassed by others. And Henry and Donaldson and Vicksburg, Grant is statistically average compared to every other general and the numbers of men he is losing in those campaigns. He is sacrificing really no more or no less than any other officer. There's no statistical kind of aberration for Grant there. Grant gets bloody, precisely where every other union commander in the war gets bloody. And that is

when he runs into Robert Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. So Grant is not a butcher until he arrives in Virginia in 1864. And Grant is not a butcher. And Grant is not a butcher. any more than any other union officer who had to fight Robert Lee and lost massive casualties. Because Lee and Grant are well matched in this regard. Lee is not going to give up. And Lee is going to take some pretty bold risks, even though he's almost always outnumbered, almost always at a disadvantage. He's willing to sacrifice his men in really interesting ways, but he does not get labeled a butcher

for it, even though his casualties are off the charts compared to. other Confederate officers. And so Grant does get that label. Cold Harbor is a bad day for Grant. And Grant admits it, you know, he admits that they certainly can't sustain that. But if you would have asked the men in the Army of the Potomac during the Overland campaign, are you happy with the way that this, you know, campaign is being conducted? This is the first time they've had a commanding officer in three and a half years that has actually pursued the Army of Northern Virginia after a battle. There's a famous scene outside of Chancellorsville in the wilderness where a road comes to a T to go one direction would be to retreat from Lee, and to go the other direction

would be to follow Lee's army and show the men that the fight is going to continue. There are famous kind of recordings of this scene. There's even an Alfred Wode sketch of it, Grant sort of riding toward this junction on the Plank Road outside of Chancellorsville, and the men are watching him to say, what is this new guy going to do? we don't know him from Adam, really. He's this new to the army. Is he going to turn left, turn right? And he turns right, and the men sort of spontaneously

throw their hats into the air and start cheering because it's the first time in three and a half years they have a general who's actually going to take the fight to leave. So if you'd ask Union soldiers, they also don't think it's particularly bloody. In fact, it's almost a relief to them to have a general, again, who's willing to take this fight to the most important Confederate army

to its most important commander. They want their shot at Lee, and Grant gives them that shot. There are several moments in history, American history, when the divine intervention seems in play. Grant coming along, rising to the leadership, seems almost divine. I mean, who else could have done this is kind of the question. And always important to remember the strategy on part of the South

was not necessarily to defeat the North. It was to bring them to the negotiating table, which Lee was well on his way to doing, because he could have extended this a long time, if not for the tactics of a Ulysses S. Grant. And that's really what brings this war to a close. I want to put a pin in the alcoholism myth of Grant. Was he known to be drinking during these campaigns? Was that part of the story at all?

Not really, no, right? No, no, he loved cigars. You know, there's an apocryphal rumor, I think, after Shiloh, where Lincoln says, send him a case of whatever his favorite thing to drink is, you know, to celebrate. I think Lincoln is just being Lincoln there. He's just kind of being funny and trying to celebrate a victory. Grant either chewed or smoked about 50 cigars a day. That was his great vice.

And that is why he will ultimately die of throat cancer. His liver is not the problem. It's his throat. It's the cigars and the smoking that he's really chomping down on, which, again, his wife clearly loved him, but it would be difficult, 50 cigars a day. Exactly. A better general than a president for sure.

Cessley, I emerge from the story of this man, in this war. I guess this is true of all great human beings of wherever they come from. He's a mixed bag for sure. But in Grant's case, it's really distinct. You have this man who is really beloved by his soldiers, his family, he has an extraordinary empathetic nature. But history has told us this story of him having these qualities of vicious nature. I wonder how you make your peace with that or whether that was true at all. Yeah, it's tough because the Civil War, and the one reason I think so many historians find it so compelling, so we love adages in history, and often we say that the history of wars is written by the winners.

But in the case of the American Civil War, the losers really got their hands on the narrative first, and they did really a heck of a job in shaping that narrative in really powerful ways, to the point that in 2024, we are 160 years from, you know, right now, at this point, in 1864, 160 years ago, Grant is ramping up to really start digging into that Overland campaign. Like, he is getting ready to take his first big shot at Robert Ely. But we're sitting here saying, you know, he was a failure and a drunk and a butcher. And that is because that is how the Confederates made sure to portray that history, because he was the only person who successfully defeated Robert E. Lee on multiple occasions.

and if you were the Confederacy after the war, your paragon, your saint, the guy that you are writing about in hegiographic terms, is Robert Ely. And to make Lee better, you make Grant worse, especially if Grant's the only guy who ever really beat him. And so the reason we have this narrative of Grant is in large part because of a history

that tried to shape him as the anti-Robbity Lee. And what I think is really interesting, we have all these new books about our Army officers, Ty Sedgely's book is wonderful on this, and grappling with the idea that for decades, even Americans who were not Confederates or Southerners, thought of Robert E. Lee as one of the great soldiers

in American history. And there's no doubt he was a great soldier. But Grant was his equal in many ways. But Grant was not spoken of in the same breath as the Robert Lee type characters. But as you noted, there are only two other soldiers in American history who even come

close to the distinction that Grant achieved in. They are two remarkable men, George Washington and John Pershing. I went on a tour of World War I sites last summer. I was blown away by Pershing. I'd never really considered him before, but to be mentioned in the same breath as those two guys means you were doing something, right? And so I think as we continue this kind of journey as professional historians, as fans of history as people who listen to podcast like this, we are beginning to unravel that loss-cause narrative. It's 160 years later, but we are starting to really do that work and grapple with that question of memory.

versus history, the historical record on Grant in terms of his Civil War Service could not be more solid, could not have done a better job. We just have to wait for the kind of memory of him to catch up to that historical narrative. So I think that's where we end. What a cause you are involved in. I mean, that's real. This is a real important consequence of historical interpretation, isn't it? This is where the rubber meets the road for a historian in terms of understanding the facts versus the fiction and how history really matters, not even only about Grant. I mean, that's a big story, but you can see how lost cause affects so much of our interpretation of civil rights, how the South shaped that story as well. Current politics even has a whole lot to do with

lost cause mythology. Yeah. And Grant sits right at the middle of it. In Grant's case, it's a lot about war. So we're talking about real tactics and interesting stuff here. And you've been a great guide through this. I hope we talk again, Cecil, this has been really fascinating to me. What's currently going on in your career that I can promote? Well, I'm sort of a variety of things. I work with Emerging Civil War. I'm their chief historian. They're a wonderful blog of of National Park guys and historians who write sort of history for the public, sort of short blog post. We have some great book series, wonderful stuff on sort of grants. So readers who are really interested in readable introductory histories of the conflict could do no better than to check out Emerging Civil

wars work. I myself am kind of working on a number of things, putting together a conference on the frontier in the presidency, which should be really interesting. We're looking at presidents in the west. And then I'm thinking I might write a book next about a guy called Abraham Lincoln. But we'll see. There's a couple books written about him already. I want to caution you. But that's me. Yeah. And my book just came out recently and grants in there quite a bit as both soldier and president. So let me remind folks what that book is called, the Army Under Fire, Anti-Mil, militarism in the Civil War era. Cecily Zander of Texas Women's University,

thank you very much. Go boldly into your career. Thanks, Don. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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