TWO LIVES OF GENERAL GRANT.*
THE list of books which deal directly or indirectly with the career and achievements of General Grant runs already to a considerable length. Only last year we noticed General King's The True Ulysses Grant, and two more biographies have lately reached us from America. Mr. Edmonds speaks modestly of his equipment for the task, but no excuse is needed for the volumel which ho has contributed to the series of
"American Crisis Biographies." It is true that no new matter of special importance is to be found in its pages, but Mr. Edmonds brings to his task both knowledge and discrimination. He writes lucidly and concisely—excelling in the art of summary—he avoids the excesses of eulogy or partisanship : in fine, he gives us a picture of Grant as a man, a general, and an administrator which reveals his greatness and his limitations, and is conceived and executed with a faithfulness and restraint entirely in keeping with the sincere, reserved, and stoical
character of his subject. It is, in fact, very much the sort of biography that Grant himself would have appreciated—honest, just, and unemo- tional Grant's career is in many ways amazing : his sudden and almost uninterrupted rise to greatness after years of failure and obscurity is remarkable even in America, the land of quick changes. But he was not an extraordinary man. Apart from his skill in horsemanship, he had none of the accomplishments which excite envy or admiration. As a boy he was uncouth, awkward, and homely. He made no very marked impression on his contemporaries at school or at West Point. There was nothing romantic, magnetic, or engaging about his person- ality, physique, or speech. His desires in regard to the choice of a profession were negative. He showed no leaning towards the Army, but had a strong distaste for his father's business—that of a tanner— and readily accepted the suggestion that he should go to West Point. In making this proposal his father was governed partly by ambition, but largely by the excellent educational facilities offered at West Point, the organization of which is admirably described by Mr. Edmonds. The staff was highly efficient and the discipline severe. To say that Grant muddled through would be perhaps unfair, but the rigorous system of " demerits " which prevailed very nearly proved his down- fall. He was more than an average mathematician, but his sole real distinction was achieved in the riding school. Passing out in 1843 at the age of twenty-one, he served for eleven years in the Army, and saw some hard fighting in the Mexican War, in which he showed courage in the field and capacity as an organizer. His superior officers thought highly of him; but after the campaign was over, and he was happily married to the sister of a West Point contemporary, loneliness and homesickness proved his undoing. He was stationed at Fort Hum- boldt, where the commander, Colonel Buchanan, was an unsympathetic) martinet. Grant was never a drunkard, but he occasionally drank too much : though he had a strong will, he had a weak head ; and Buchanan, hearing that he had on one occasion in 1854 been under the influence of liquor while paying off his company, gave him the option of resigning or standing trial, with the result that Grant immediately resigned and severed his connexion with the Service. The United States Army and Navy Journal for June 6th, 1908, establishes the facts that Grant's fellow-officers considered Buchanan to have been unnecessarily harsh, and that it was generally believed that if Grant had stood trial be might not have been condemned. But putting it at the worst, Grant expiated his lapse by years of obscurity passed in uncongenial employment. The charge of intemperance dogged him throughout his military career. That he occasionally gave ground for it is indicated by the admissions and remonstrances of his best friends ; but the accusa- tions were grossly exaggerated, and in many cases prompted by jealousy. It cannot be proved that his weakness ever seriously impaired his effi- ciency in the field, and perhaps the best comment is to be found in Lincoln's historic retort that if he knew the particular brand of whisky which Grant drank, he would send several barrels of it to his other generals. During the seven years that elapsed before the outbreak of the war Grant embarked in various business ventures as a farmer, real estate agent, &c., but with unvarying ill-success. He came of a good pioneer stock and understood farming operations thoroughly; from the ago of seven to seventeen he had worked as hard as many full-grown labourers; but he was destitute of commercial astuteness and unfortunate in his choice of partners. Towards the end of this period he had actually gone back to the leather trade when the war came and gave him his oppor- tunity. He began with office work, but was soon promoted to the command of a Volunteer regiment, where he enforced discipline with an Iron hand, and his successes in the field soon led to his transferenee • (1) Ulysses 8. Grant. By Franklin Spencer Edmonds. "American Crisis Bio- graphies." Philadelphia : George W. Jacobs and Co. Y1'25.]—(2) Ulysses S' Omsk By Lovoll Coombs. Loudon: liacmillan and Co. Pg. nat.' to the Regular Army. To describe hi3 subsequent services to the armies of the North would be to retell an oft-told tale ; but some points are worth insisting on. Grant was not a Hannibal or a Napoleon. His great quality was tenacity, as summed up in his laconic saying : "I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer." This exposed him to charges of a brutal expenditure of life in frontal attacks, but his strategy seldom failed when he was properly supported. Lincoln, who was accused of interfering too much with some generals, once he found in Grant the right man in the right place, gave him a free hand, The Generals of the North were not a band of brothers, but in Sherman and McPherson—Ohio men like himself—Grant found consistent loyalty and trust. But jealousy and calumny never depressed him; and along with determination went self-controL In the whole course of the war he was only known to show anger twice : once when he saw a soldier mishandling a woman, and again when he saw a trooper cruelly treating a horse. He never swore and sternly discountenanced foul talk. And his resolution in action was equalled by his magnanimity in victory. In the final scene at Appomattox Grant rose to true heroic stature by his chivalrous consideration for his noble opponent and his refusal to allow his troops to exult over their vanquished fellow-countrymen. Mr. Edmonds deals judicially with Grant's record as President. To put it crudely, Grant's heart was in the right place; he was sound on fundamental principles but he understood politicians no better than finance. No clearer light can be thrown on tho weakness of his administration than is to be found in his answer to a deputation of members of Congress who called on him to suggest the removal of a Cabinet official. "When the purpose of the deputation had been stated, Grant replied, 'The true test of friendship after all isn't to stand by a man when he is in the right : any one will do that ; but the true test is to stand by him when he is in the wrong.' And that test he accepted and fulfilled." In the campaign for reforming the Civil Service Grant began on the side of the reformers, consulting his own judgment solely as to personal fitness in Cabinet and office appointments. "He had also appointed a Civil Service Commission which, under the leadership of the gifted Curtis, formulated rules for competitive examinations. But the pressure soon grew overwhelming, and was greatest from his own friends, and finally the merit system was ignored, and its leading advocates in the Cabinet, Cox and Hoar, summarily dismissed." And so it came about that the same man who "from early manhood had learned to disregard popular clamour" fell a prey, in Sherman's words, to the flattery of designing Senators and members of Congress. After his second term Grant's tour round the world gratified his love of travel, while the recognition of his achievements proved embarrassing to his modesty. The last years of his life were clouded by financial disasters, the result of ignorance and over-confidence, and by broken health, but there was something heroic in the determination with which, when already struck down by mortal illness, he set to work to earn money for his family by writing his memoirs. Mr. Edmonds rightly emphasizes his command of a terse and expressive style, which he illustrates by many notable sayings, and continues :— " But, perhaps, the most striking of all his comments was that upon war,—` Though I have been trained as a soldier and have partici- pated in many battles, there never was a time when in my opinion some way could not have been found of preventing the drawing of the sword. I look forward to an epoch when a court recognized by all nations will settle international differences instead of keeping large standing armies as they do in Europe.' Here then was a man
who made a .r beginning in life, but recognizing his mistake he redeemed elf at the right time. When the crisis came,
his military experience and poise enabled him to do something even with small resources, until at last he won recognition as the best- qualified man in the nation for large command. When the war had been fought to a finish and the Union preserved, the gratitude of his countrymen brought him into civil life for which he had little aptitude and no previous training. Even in these now experiences, however, he showed himself right upon fundamental questions, and if he was not able to curb the administrative demoralization of his time, it may at least be questioned whether any other could have done much better. In war and in peace, he never doubted the future of his countryeir the security of its institutions. The world will not willingly forget the life and work of a conqueror whose first thought was of sympathy with the sensitive feelings of the vanquished, and whose message to his countrymen when on the verge of his highest honor was,—' Let us have Peace.'"
Mr. Lovell Coombs's work is richer in anecdote and more populas in its appeal, but it is uncritical in tone and undistinguished in style. It is charactoristio of his method that he devotes more than twice as much space to Grant's tour round the world than to his eight years at the White House.
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