![]() ![]() He is frequently castigated as a "drunk" (Grant did indeed have problems with alcohol early in his career) and as a "butcher", in spite of the extraordinary strategic skill he displayed in the Vicksburg campaign, at Fort Donelson, in crossing the James River en route to Petersburg, and elsewhere (and in spite of the relatively low casualty rates, overall, of the armies under his command). He offers a reappraisal of the Grant presidency in this volume, in company with some other contemporary scholarly reassessments.Īs Bunting emphasizes, Grant has suffered from cliches both as General and as President. Bunting is a former army officer who served as the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute for many years. ![]() Grant (1822 - 1885) who served as the eighteenth president of the United States (1869 - 1877). In this volume of the series, Josiah Bunting III offers an admirable and challenging portrait of U.S. Each volume is written by a scholar who brings his or her own perspective to the subject, focusing on the factors that make the president in question worth knowing and remembering. The short volumes in the American Presidents series offer an outstanding way for readers to get reacquainted with American history and with our Nation's leaders. ![]() Grant was a fine judge of men in the dark days of war, but his instincts failed him during “The Gilded Age.” It was the men, though-not U.S. They grabbed all they could when things were good, and after the Panic of 1873 (known to Americans-for almost fifty years-as “the Great Depression”), it was “run for the lifeboats, every man for himself.” The truth is that America, in the heady days of industrialization and financial speculation, had fallen in love with the Almighty Dollar. His dry sense of humor was sometimes taken for stupidity (his remark that “Venice would be a fine city if they would only drain the streets” was almost certainly a joke), and his support for Native Americans and the principles of Reconstruction, although in many ways wrongheaded, was sincere and intentionally benign. Still, I don’t think Grant gets the credit he deserves. On the other hand, to think of him as president, responding with the same enigmatic stolidity as capitalists looted the nation, second-generation Republicans sold out Reconstruction, and his old cronies engaged in self-dealing, is to be filled not only with sadness but a sense of waste. ![]() To think of him as general, sending thousands to almost certain death, without shedding a tear or suffering a tremor, is to be filled with wonder to understand that he used their deaths skillfully, in the service of a great moral cause, is to be filled with terror and awe. Grant will always be a bit of enigma, for he was a man of few words who kept his feelings to himself. But then I thought: isn’t this really just my reponse to Grant’s life? Wouldn’t it be most people’s natural reaction? Grant was that I was intrigued and absorbed by its first half (early years, military life, the two wars) but bored and saddened by its second half (Johnson, Reconstruction, Grant’s presidency the European tour, bankruptcy and decline). My first response after finishing Josiah Bunting’s short biography of U. Grant was indeed a military man of the highest order, and he was a better president than he is often given credit for. Grant made it his priority to forge the states into a single nation, and Bunting shows that despite the troubles that characterized Grant's terms in office, he was able to accomplish this most important task-very often through the skillful use of his own popularity with the American people. His predecessor, Andrew Johnson, had been impeached and nearly driven from office, and the radical Republicans in Congress were intent on imposing harsh conditions on the Southern states before allowing them back into the Union. Grant came to Washington in 1869 to lead a capital and a country still bitterly divided by four years of civil war. But that caricature does not do justice to the realities of Grant's term in office, as Josiah Bunting III shows in this provocative assessment of our eighteenth president. But his presidency is another matter-the most common word used to characterize it is "scandal." Grant is routinely portrayed as a man out of his depth, whose trusting nature and hands-off management style opened the federal coffers to unprecedented plunder. Grant is routinely described in glowing terms-the man who turned the tide of the Civil War, who accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and who had the stomach to see the war through to final victory. The underappreciated presidency of the military man who won the Civil War and then had to win the peace as wellĪs a general, Ulysses S. ![]()
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