GENERAL GRANT.*
THE biography of a soldier should be written either for soldiers or for the general public. In the former case, criticism of military operations should furnish strictly • Utueses S. Grant and the*P.-ribd of National Preservation and Reconstruction. By William coiant Church, Brevet Lieutenaot•Colonel H.S. Vols. 'Heroes of the Nations Bents." London; Patnam's Sons. military reasons for praise or blame ; in the latter, explana. tion should be full enough for the average reader to follow with tolerable ease. Colonel Church seems to fall heavily between the two stools. Here, for instance, is his defence of Grant's action in the important battle of Shiloh (April 6th, 1862) :—" In answer to the criticism upon the position of the Union army with a river in their rear, General Sherman says : If there were any errors in putting that army on the west side of the Tennessee, exposed to the superior force of the enemy, also assembling at Corinth, the mistake was not General Grant's, but there was no mistake.'" Sherman is certainly a great name; but if there is to be criticism at all of military movements, there is no sense in attempting to knock down opposition with an ipse dint. It would have been better freely to admit that at this time Grant did not know his business. As for the readers who seek general information, we would defy the most intelligent, unless he were previously acquainted with the history of the war, to obtain from this volume any sound general idea of its course ; and without such a general conception it is impossible to value Grant's share in it. Colonel Church does not even mark out for his readers the area of combat ; he does not allow for the average man's ignorance of geography, and gives, for the moat part, only small maps illustrating local operations, and tbose maps he places very often at inconvenient points in the text. A map should come before, not after, the chapter to which it relates. In short, the book is one which we cannot recommend, upon a subject where a good book would have been extremely valuable. English people are mortally ignorant of American history, and Grant was, as Colonel Church says, the man who best represented the most impor. taut epoch in that history.
His personality detaches itself plainly enough from Colonel Church's narrative. The family descended from an old Evangelical stock settled in America in the time of Charles I. Grant's father was an energetic but not wholly successful man of business, and Grant received the bringing-up of an ordinary farmer's lad, though with no lack of schooling. The one distinction of his youth was an extraordinary skill in horsemanship, which made him conspicuous at the West Point military academy, where his leap of 5 ft. 6A in., "made on Old York, a horse that no one else dared ride," still holds the record. His first experience of war was in the Mexican Cam- paign of 1846, where he served with an ability of which his studies at West Point had given no great promise. In 1853 he resigned his commission under circumstances which Colonel Church does not state quite clearly; but it would appear that, although not ordered to send in his papers, he did so in consequence of a reprimand for drunkenness. The failing was exceptional in him, but a life of abstemiousness did not wholly remove the slur, and the charge was brought up repeatedly to argue unfitness in him for high command. For the next seven years he was occupied in a struggle to maintain his family, already considerable, as he had married very young ; to do more than maintain it was entirely beyond him. This shrewd and tenacious American lacked the American talent for moneymaking, and it might be argued that he succeeded in conducting war for the same reasons as he failed in conducting business. He never played for his own hand, and when risks were to be taken he preferred to take them himself; these arc not the maxims of commerce. At all events, it is clear that Grant's merit as a general pro. ceeded from moral and instinctive qualities rather than intellectual acquirements.
The outbreak of war in 1861 found him a tanner's clerk in Galena, Illinois. With characteristic modesty he did not thrust himself into prominence, although a soldier among hordes of undisciplined volunteers, and in his applications for command made no mention of his Mexican service. Very soon, however, his usefulness was discovered, and he was given a regiment to reduce to order. Of his military career there is no space to write here ; but what distin. guished him from the first was his perception of the difference between such troops as were engaged on both sides and European regulars. To assume the offensive is always held to be an advantage in war. Grant perceived that this was doubly true when applied to volunteers, who are more liable to surprises, and lauking in steady confidence. His first great success, the capture of Fort Donelson, was practically a piece of bluff. Grant had fifteen thousand men, Floyd had twenty thousand behind strong works ; but Grant
realised that Floyd was afraid of him, and by a series of assaults induced the Confederates to treat, and having got so far, absolutely terrified them by demanding unconditional surrender, to which they assented, never doubting that such confidence implied immense superiority. It was a brilliant achievement, won by a complete and well-founded disregard of all rules of regular warfare. Yet two months later, at Shiloh, a very different disregard came near to terminating Grant's success. His force and Sherman's, with the river behind them, were left without any screen of pickets, and the Confederates surprised them with a march by no means rapid. A desperate resistance to a somewhat disjointed attack saved the situation, but retreat was impossible. Indeed that was characteristic of most of these battles. The commanders knew their business so ill that no clear line of retreat was provided, and beaten troops were slaughtered in numbers that recall the records of hand-to-hand fighting. Grant, however, had the clear sense to grasp a very important fact : that the armies in both sides, heavily as they were wasted by these encounters, wasted more rapidly in the field from other causes. Continuance in the field, for troops ill- provided with campaigning necessaries, and not inured to soldiering, meant a loss from disease far greater than the death-roll of battle ; and more formidable still was the shrinkage from desertion. Here are the figures for the war :—Killed in battle and died of wounds, 93,443; died of disease, 186,216; deserted, 189,015. To fight, therefore, appeared to him a less risk than to remain in the field in action, and he won by his continual determination to be doing something more than by any remarkable skill in strategy. His skill, however, is not to be depreciated ; the war was his great school ; and increased command gave him greater free- dom to carry out his wishes. Nothing could be more unlike the slow action of the early campaigns than the energy with which Lee's beaten army was hunted to its final surrender after the fall of Richmond.
The record of Grant's Presidency is instructive reading, if somewhat depressing. He honestly tried to reform the civil service in America, and he completely failed. The business men whom he summoned—perhaps without tact—to quit their own affairs for those of the State, and so enable him to dispense with the professional politicians, did not respond to the call. He was thrown back upon military advisers, of whom all civilians were jealous, and who showed the usual defects of their qualities. Very interesting at the present moment is his attitude towards the West Indian islands. He was strong for the annexation of San Domingo, which was then desirous to be annexed. In the Cuban trouble of 1873 he sympathised with Cuba, but only threatened Spain with war when American citizens were executed. His plan, it appears, involved the invasion of Spain by a flying column under Sheridan. If America embarks in that enterprise when the war comes—as it seems bound to come sooner or later— her experience of European campaigning is likely to be disastrous. Public economy was one of Grant's ideals, and he left the pension-list in 1877 at twenty-eight millions. It stood in 1896 at one hundred and forty millions, sur- vivors of the war having multiplied, it would seem, like rabbits. But even under his honesty there were too many irregularities; and, speaking generally, he had to contend with a great relaxation (in Colonel Church's words) of "the official sense of public accountability." Grant suffered for the short- comings of his nation in his private as well as his public capacity. After his retirement a Wall Street broker entered into partnership with one of Grants sons, and in 1880 induced the ex-President to become a partner. A crash followed, and not only Grant's fortune but his good name foundered; he had been used as a bait to investors. The old man behaved as was to be expected ; insisted upon making over to Vanderbilt, as the only possible payment for a loan, the great collection of historical relics which he had acquired, partly in the war, partly in his travels when he went round the world and was everywhere the guest of crowned heads ; refused a pension ; and at last, one is glad to say, found an easy remedy for his distress in accepting the liberal offers of publishers. Literature afforded him not only competence but a pleasant occupation, and the world gained a book of surpassing interest, his Memoirs. But it was a sad enough close to so great a career ; and one feels that Grant's mibfortune, like his public failures, was typical of America, just as his virtues and successes were also
typical of that great Republic. The war of North against South was, perhaps, the greatest struggle for a moral object —the suppression of slavery—that the world has seen ; but America has also produced forms of municipal administration more corrupt than any in civilised Europe and a commercial morality which has lowered the ethics of trade. There are, of course, plenty of upright public servants in America and thousands of honest traders, but, unfortunately, a tolerance of ill-doing marks both spheres of life. It will be a great day for the world when Americans hang a speculator. Why society has not long ago introduced the " cat " for men of the kind who ruined Grant, is one of the inscrutable mysteries.
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