00:00:03
Speaker 1: He’s chasing down this Confederate group of soldiers and he knows where they’re camped. They’re camped over this hill, and this is his first time he’s going to face battle during the Civil War. And he says, man, I said, we’re going up over this hill. I starts to get so nervous. It feels like my heart is in my throat. He’s freaking out. And they get up over the crest of the hill and they look down and the camp’s gone, and he, you know, his heart and went back to his place, he says, and he goes. But I learned a valuable lesson in this. I learned that the enemy is just as afraid of me as I am afraid of them.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: This episode, Part five of our American Civil War series, is about Ulysses S. Grant, the commanding general of the Union Army. I’d say he’s the most underrated player in the Civil War. But was he actually or was his reputation besmirched in strategic effort to renarrate the Southern cause. Regardless, we’re gonna hear about Grant’s meteoric rise from selling firewood in the streets to becoming the leading general of the American Army in the span of five years, and within two more years he was the war hero President of the United States, Considered one of the most famous men on planet Earth. This story is one of the most fascinating in American history, and I really doubt that you’re gonna want to miss this one. My name is Klay Nukeomb and this is the Beargrease Podcast, where we’ll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we’ll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
00:01:51
Speaker 3: Brought to you by to COV’s Boots.
00:01:54
Speaker 2: I’m a cowboy boot man and I’ve been wearing to Covis for years. They’re the most comfortable boot I’ve ever put on. Good boots for good times, if I’m being honest. When I started this series on the American Civil War, the leader of the Union Army, General Ulysses As Grant, was the person I was least interested in. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but I’d rarely heard anything about him. His brilliance was never bragged on, like his Confederate counterpart Robert E. Lee, and Grant never had an orange dodge charger named after him, that could ramp buildings while evading the government’s corrupt officers.
00:02:46
Speaker 3: This is gonna make more sense later, But.
00:02:49
Speaker 2: As I learned the history, Grant quickly became a focal point of intrigue, partly because of his character, his dogged tenacity, his addictions, his history was slaves, but mainly because he was like a shadow to me.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: My interest in this man took me on a road trip.
00:03:11
Speaker 2: So I’m in Starkville, Mississippi, at Mississippi State University, and I am going to the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, and I cannot wait to understand and learn why.
00:03:26
Speaker 3: That it’s here. Because Ulysses S.
00:03:29
Speaker 2: Grant was the champion general of the Union Army, probably the most underrated underrecognized player inside the Civil War. And his presidential library is deep in the South. Most presidential libraries are in cities that meant something to the president.
00:03:51
Speaker 3: Grant never lived in Mississippi. This is odd.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: But I’ve come here with an assumption that have already stated twice that Grant is underrated. But was he or is he just underrated in the South? This is all a bit fishy. I walk up a long set of stairs to the fourth floor of this big, beautiful brick building to meet Louis Gallo. He’s a tall, stout built man with dark framed glasses, genuine eyes, wearing a collared shirt and slacks, and he’s standing by a cannon.
00:04:24
Speaker 3: Hello, Hey, Louie.
00:04:27
Speaker 2: Hey Louis clay nukelem Clayton. Yes, this’s my wife missed it. Louis is an expert on Ulysses S. Grant, having edited and annotated Grant’s personal memoir in twenty seventeen in a well received Harvard University press book. This library has every written correspondence of Grant’s that’s in existence, that has uncountable personal items, including a pistol, furniture, some clothing, an original portrait of Grant, life sized mannequins of Grant at different stages in his life. And when I stand up next to him, turns out he’s about five foot eight and weighs about one hundred and forty five pounds during wartime. This is a top shelf museum, is what I’m trying to say. And I’ve come here with an assumption that my thoughts on Grant, or even lack of thoughts on Grant, are across the board in America. Now, I may have started off on the wrong foot with Louis, but I have to be honest with him.
00:05:29
Speaker 3: But he’s about to teach me something I didn’t know.
00:05:32
Speaker 2: Is it true that Grant is one of the more underappreciated players in the Civil War?
00:05:39
Speaker 1: I mean, I would disagree with that. I think he’s pretty I think he’s pretty appreciated. Now, okay, well, let me give you a little more complicated answer that question. I think over time that reputation has changed. Right after the Civil War, you have the Lost Cause movement, and the crux of the Lost Cause movement is to lift up the Confederate cause and Roberty Lee and to knock down Grant. And so that’s where all these big stories about him and his drinking and his character and he was a butcher, like a cold harbor like. That’s where all this comes from, is this Lost Cause movement. And it’s effective. Right now. They always say history is written by the winners. That it’s not always the case, because the ex Confederates did a great job at publicity in trying to change the narrative after the war. And so yeah, so for years, for decades, he is undervalued. He is seen as just a drunken butcher who got lucky because he had more resources than Lee did and he just overwhelmed them.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: Okay, the Lost Cause movement? Have you heard of that? I’m embarrassed to say that. I’m a grown dad gum man and I’m just learning about it. Could I unknowingly be a product of a marketing campaign started in the eighteen seventies.
00:07:02
Speaker 3: Maybe could this.
00:07:04
Speaker 2: Be part of the origin of the warm feelings towards the Confederacy I spoke of in the first episode. Maybe The Lost Cause movement is controversial with some, but a widely accepted idea that there was a revisionist ideology that emerged in the American South after the war, framing the Confederate Cause as morally heroic in their attempt to fight an army superior in number for the sole purpose of states rights. There’s traces of it all over down here. In eighteen sixty six, a book titled The Lost Cause coined the term and the idea. Influential Confederate organizations started forming soon after the war. One of those would be the United Daughters of the Confederacy, started in eighteen ninety four. Confederate monuments started popping up, peaking around eighteen ninety through the nineteen thirties.
00:07:59
Speaker 3: Many other books were published.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: About this, including the nineteen thirty six Pulitzer Prize book Gone with the Wind and the movie in nineteen thirty nine, which I watched as a kid, the most recent evidence being the mainstream interest in the Civil War in the last half of the twentieth century.
00:08:17
Speaker 3: The Dukes of Hazzard TV.
00:08:19
Speaker 2: Show came out the year of my birth, nineteen seventy nine, and for the next twenty years, every kid in America had a General Lee General Lee Toy Carr with a rebel flag on the roof. Bo and Luke Duke were just good old boys fighting a corrupt government. Sound familiar, never meaning no harm, beats all. You never saw been in trouble with the law since the day they was born. Even Steve Ranella, growing up in Michigan, had a General Lee Carr. I’m telling you, we all did, and it had nothing to do with race relations in our mind. The nostalgic opening lines of Don Williams nineteen eighty song Good Old Boys Like Me is a crumb of the campaign.
00:09:05
Speaker 3: Over a century later, when I was a kid of Kareem a supper.
00:09:11
Speaker 2: To bed.
00:09:15
Speaker 4: With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head.
00:09:21
Speaker 3: I grew up listening to that song. It’s a great song.
00:09:25
Speaker 2: I read children’s books about Stonewall Jackson when I was in the second grade. I was taught that he’s our direct ken on my grandmother’s side. Will definitely be back to this idea of the Lost Cause. I’m endlessly fascinated by things in our culture that impact us, but that were completely unaware of their origins. But directly after the war and soon after Grant’s presidency, without a doubt, the focus of the Lost Cause campaign was to dethrone Ulysses S. Grant, and it looks like it worked. Here is doctor Brooke Blevins on Grant.
00:10:02
Speaker 4: I think he I think still he gets he gets minimized too much in Civil War history because it you know, for for so many years the Lost Cause created this marble character of Robert E. Lee as the great and he was a great general, but as a as a general, I mean he he was Lincoln’s guy, and Lincoln recognized that this is the guy that can can win me this war.
00:10:31
Speaker 2: If Brooks says it, I believe it. The Lost Cause is a real thing, but it wasn’t just the Lost Cause. Grant’s got to take some personal responsibility for this. He’s a complicated man with some stuff going against him, and some of it may revolve around our perception of ourselves.
00:10:51
Speaker 4: He was underestimated for so much of the war because he didn’t look the part.
00:10:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s a short.
00:10:58
Speaker 4: Dumpy, kind of dishevel guy. You know, his uniforms always messed up, and probably his boots weren’t shined up and things like that. He’s just just kind of a messy, sloppy.
00:11:10
Speaker 3: Interested in having the accolades of being a general.
00:11:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, he didn’t.
00:11:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, he wanted to be called sir, and he he was just.
00:11:17
Speaker 3: Just all business.
00:11:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he was, you know, his subordinates talked about him drinking and stuff like that. He just he had a lot of things, a lot of strikes against him in terms of rising through the ranks.
00:11:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, of the military hierarchy.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: You know, as you say that, it also makes me think that a person’s perception of themselves is often the way that people view them, good and bad. It’s really kind of a not a pleasant truth if it is in fact a truth that Grant always had this kind of like I’m not.
00:11:51
Speaker 3: Here for the glory.
00:11:53
Speaker 2: I’m not here to be famous, I’m not here to be well known. I’m just here to get the job done. And he absolutely does, and then history’s kind of just like dismissive of him, kind of like this Scottie Pippen. My wife always talks about Scottie Pippen being statistically one of the best players in the NBA. He got paid less than all these other guys and it was Misty Nukeom the Great Sports Analysis says that it was was because he perceived himself as small. I think there’s something maybe to be learned there from Grant. He kind of prophesied almost he got what he asked for. But then you don’t want to walk around life like asking for recognition or something.
00:12:42
Speaker 3: When you don’t deserve it.
00:12:43
Speaker 2: I mean, we’ve all been taught to be humble, or hopefully we have, and not think too highly of yourself and just kind of be who you are, and we see that in Grant. But then you see kind of history treat him a little bit like he asked to be treated.
00:12:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:12:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. But one thing he was he was persistent, and he was relentless, and he was a fighter.
00:13:07
Speaker 1: And that’s what.
00:13:08
Speaker 4: Lincoln needed with someone who would who would just take it to the enemy and you get punched in the face and you get back and you just go right back at him. And Grant did that.
00:13:19
Speaker 2: If Scotty, a fellow Arkansan ever listens to this, I hope you feel the love coming from Bear Grease. And like Scotty on the court Us, Grant was a war horse general on the battlefield. But before Grant was forty years old, he’d experience almost uncountable business failures. He’d be swindled by almost every business partner he ever had, and was basically forced to resign from the army because of a drinking problem. These failures seemed to temper him, and when he would rise to the top, his lack of ego and ambition in contrast to his peers was notable. But now that we’ve addressed that, we’ve got to address the elephant in the room, which I talked about at the beginning of this episode, and that question is why is his library in the Deep South?
00:14:14
Speaker 1: Now, on the surface, you know it does seem weird. I thought it was weird.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: You usually think of Presidential library as being in a place that meant something to the president.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Yes, and one hundred percent, but there is a historical connection at least between Grant and the state. Now he’s not from here.
00:14:31
Speaker 3: He fought here.
00:14:32
Speaker 1: He fought here. He was here for well over a year and a half. Yeah, fighting here, yea. And what’s even more important in that is that that’s really what catapults him to the national stage as well.
00:14:43
Speaker 3: Okay, his work hit, what he did, what.
00:14:45
Speaker 1: He does in Mississippi, and so really without Mississippi, we don’t know who Grant was. Right, It’s been really good.
00:14:51
Speaker 2: So it wasn’t an attempt for the South to control the narrative on you.
00:14:54
Speaker 3: This is Asta Grant. It was not a conspiracy theory that I heard about this.
00:14:59
Speaker 1: Oh really, you heard this.
00:15:00
Speaker 2: It came from my wife. We were joking by the way here and then.
00:15:07
Speaker 3: You say that or was that that’s what I thought I thought it was.
00:15:10
Speaker 2: You know, this sounds like a great conspiracy theory.
00:15:13
Speaker 1: It does. But you know, it’s funny that you say that because the president of the university, doctor Mark Keenan, he’s really the one who championed having this here. But he talks about this or he says, you know, the idea is in the quote that he has is we want to we want to show things not from a Southern perspective or in a northern perspective, but an American perspective.
00:15:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right, it appears that it’s not a conspiracy, but the functional reason the library is here is logistical. The Grant Library moved from Southern Illinois University to Mississippi State in two thousand and eight because they needed more space and Mississippi had the funds and champion the cause. And Louis and his colleagues are passionate about it, and they’re proud that it’s here, and this place is worth a But it’s time to get down to the details. I ask Louis to tell us about ulysses As Grant’s early life, what formed him. This is going to help us see who this man is.
00:16:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is great because I honestly think that’s one of the most compelling parts of his stories, his early life. It’s kind of overshadowed, right, Obviously, we always think about the general, we always think about the president, But where did he come from? Kind of right, So yeah, I can definitely do that to answer your question. He was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, April twenty seventh, eighteen twenty two. It’s a small little Ohio River valley town. At a young age, the family up and moves to Georgetown, Ohio, which is not too far right outside of Cincinnati, and that’s where he grows up. A good, interesting little story that most people don’t know. His father grew up in Ohio to his father as a young man, lived with John Brown, d John Brown, the John Brown John Brown. Really, yes, that’s a lot. It’s a fact that most people don’t realize. He worked as a tanner for John Brown’s father. I think his father’s name was Owen Brown. And so he lived and he lived with the abolitionist, Yes, the abolitionists who kind of either started this.
00:17:12
Speaker 3: Got skilled civil warriors.
00:17:14
Speaker 1: Yes, And so that might inform you a little bit about Grant’s parents, right. His father was a very he had a very big personality, so I guess we would describe it he was an abolitionist. That kind of informs Grant’s worldview. But Grant himself, though I wouldn’t call him an abolitionist. Early on in his life. I would kind of label him as indifferent towards the institution of slavery. Didn’t really affect him personally, and so I don’t think he really thought too much about it.
00:17:44
Speaker 2: This is worth a look because there’s more here than meets the eye. Grant’s father, Jesse Grant, was a narcissist and a staunch abolitionist with a huge personality. He loved to squabble with people. He loved to tout his own achievements, and Grant’s personality would be the exact opposite in every way. He was a man who let his accomplishments speak for themselves, even to a fault. Grant had impeccable character when it came to self promotion. He didn’t promote himself. He lacked any sense of visible vanity. He didn’t dress fancy like the other generals. Some even said he was sloppy. He made a lifelong commitment to view the best in people, even his rivals like Bobby Lee, and he had unshakable loyalty, which was personified in his relationship to Lincoln and many of the other generals. But this went against him in business because he always got taken advantage of As a child, Grant stood up to bullies, protecting the weak, but was also picked on himself. He was quiet and often a loner. Later in his military career, he would shut down any and all course talk about women. He maintained his faithfulness to his wife Julia until the end of his life and his his entire life.
00:19:00
Speaker 3: Listen to this.
00:19:02
Speaker 2: He refused to use vulgar language once he said that he’d let the words thunder and lightning slip from his mouth, as if that were a curse word. But oddly Grant’s views on slavery evolved over the years. Was it because he wanted to be different than his hot headed dad. We’re going to learn that Grant would marry a girl from Missouri whose family owned slaves, and we’ll learn that Grant even owned one slave in eighteen fifty eight for one year a man was given to him. It’s complex, So back to the issue of him not being a complete abolitionist from the beginning.
00:19:48
Speaker 1: But it’s surprising though, considering who he was growing up around right right, But as a kid he wasn’t really he was doing what kids do at the time who were living kind of what they would consider Western life. He’s working the fields, he’s working with animals. As a young boy, Uh, he’s obviously really really good with horses, which we see later on in his life. He’s so good with horses in fact, that even as a little kid, maybe about eight or nine, maybe ten years old, his parents are letting him drive seventy miles away like on with horses, you know, to transport good.
00:20:24
Speaker 2: Like letting him take the car today, Yeah, letting him take the horse. Yeah, seventy miles away, yes, ten years old.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: He was doing this. Yeah, so he was really really comfortable.
00:20:33
Speaker 3: Was he a horse trainer?
00:20:34
Speaker 1: I mean you could say he was.
00:20:36
Speaker 2: I mean he I guess everybody could ride a horse during that time because you had to. Yes, I mean pretty much everything. He could hit a team to a wagon, one hundred percent. He was known as a horseman.
00:20:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, one hundred percent.
00:20:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, Grant as a horseman and a trainer is an understatement. He began riding at age five and was said to stand up with one foot on a horse’s back while riding full speed with only a sheep skin on the animal, no saddle. When he was under ten years old, a circus came through town and recruited a boy from the audience to ride a bronchy pony as it ran around the ring to see if the kid could stay on. Ulysses was selected and he jumped on the pony and it ran fast laps around the ring.
00:21:19
Speaker 3: But the crowd pleaser this whole.
00:21:21
Speaker 2: Thing was when a monkey ran into the ring on command and jumped on the rider’s back. Almost all the riders fell off in the melee, but Grant stuck in the saddle like glue, riding until the ring master called him off him and that monkey and the crowd was shorted their pony wreck. Louis mentioned Grant riding seventy miles when he was ten years old, but when he was a young teenager he had delivery service where he’d take a horse and wagon over two hundred and fifty miles to Cincinnati. His relaxed demeanor, fearlessness, and his natural instinct made him a natural with horses, and he started training horses early in life, in a time when training was.
00:22:04
Speaker 3: Typically harsh and even cruel.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: By the time he was an adult, he was known as a virtuoso on horseback, and in the Mexican War, he broke wild horses for the Army one soldier reported watching Grant blindfold, bridle and saddle and unbroke horse and ride it for three hours until it was tame. Grant said, if people knew how much more they could get out of a horse by gentleness than by harshness, they would save a great deal of trouble, both to the horse and to the man.
00:22:38
Speaker 3: These words would be.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: Prophetic words that reflected the way that he treated people, too, But it’s also ironic because he was a masterful and relentless war leader. A story that Grant told in his memoirs that embarrassed him his whole life and kind of built his psyche. Once his dad had him go try to buy a horse from a neighbor. The horse was for twenty five dollars, and his dad said, hey, offer him twenty If you won’t take twenty, offer him twenty two. If you won’t take twenty two, then just pay him to twenty five. So this young Grant, he’s like ten years old, goes to the neighbor and he says, sir, my dad says, to offer you twenty, then twenty two, and if you want to take that, I’ll take the horse for twenty five Grant was embarrassed about this the rest of his life. He was incredibly self conscious and reserved and kind of a loner. Here’s more on horses.
00:23:37
Speaker 1: But he was kind of a whisperer of sorts, you know, and we see that in the Civil War when he’s you know, the horses that he rode during the Civil War, some of them are impressive thoroughbreds. And I don’t know what you know about thoroughbred racing, but Thoroughbreds are big, fast animals. And his horse, the most famous one, Cincinnati, was actually son of Lexington, who was one of the most wealth known thoroughbred sires of the nineteenth century. And so this, I mean, he’s got the.
00:24:04
Speaker 3: This is it’s like a Porsche. Oh, it’s like driving a Porsche like it’s nothing.
00:24:08
Speaker 5: You know.
00:24:08
Speaker 1: So yeah, so really he gets that connection with horses.
00:24:12
Speaker 3: He builds the size of a jockey too.
00:24:14
Speaker 1: Yep.
00:24:15
Speaker 3: It would help little guys can be like really good horsemen.
00:24:18
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. So yeah, he just that’s basically his life as a kid is just work in the fields, working with horses. He goes to school, he does have like a kind of a basic education, you know.
00:24:28
Speaker 3: Were they an affluent family.
00:24:30
Speaker 1: I would consider them well off in a way. They weren’t poor, but they weren’t extremely wealthy. His father, even though he had connections and was a successful tanner, they weren’t.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: They weren’t the aspirations for his son to maybe go further than further than he did.
00:24:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, than being a tanner. But then when he becomes of age, his father secures him an appointment to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.
00:24:59
Speaker 2: You list at age eighteen would outright reject the idea of going to West Point. He wanted to farm and train horses. He never did great in school, and he didn’t think he could pass the entrance exam. When his father finally made him go, he told his friends he hoped he would have some kind of accident on the way there to keep him from going, but that wouldn’t happen. When Ulysses arrived, he was an undersized, scrawnye five foot two. This is before he’s full grown five foot two, weighing one hundred and seventeen pounds, little more than the size of a child. But upon entrance into West Point, something would change, namely his name.
00:25:40
Speaker 1: He gets into West Point, kind of by luck. One of his class fellow classmates in town actually got an appointment to West Point, but couldn’t pass the examination, the entrance exam, so he had to withdraw. And so the congressman was looking for another person to a point, Ulysses As Grant. Fun fact, his name was not Ulysses S. Grant, it was Hiram Ulysses Grant. But Thomas Hamer, the congressman who who appointed him the West Point, put it down as Ulysses S. Grant, and their theories on it. We think maybe he would have went by Ulysses, so that’s what Hamer knew, so he put Ulysses. We think because he didn’t know his middle name. Maybe he put s just because Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson. But as Grant says, the S stands for nothing. It was just the typo.
00:26:31
Speaker 2: It was typo by congressman that yes, is getting him an appointment to west Point.
00:26:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:26:36
Speaker 2: So when he shows up at West Point, he goes Hiram Ulysses Grant here and they go, who’s that.
00:26:44
Speaker 3: Ulysses S.
00:26:45
Speaker 1: Grant? Right, And it’s either you can take this or go home, And he accepted it.
00:26:49
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:26:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:26:51
Speaker 2: As a child, kids made fun of him for his initials h u g hiram ulysses Grant. But this typo made his initials almost prophetically us Grant. At west Point, his classmates would start calling the little man Sam Grant.
00:27:08
Speaker 1: But yeah, so he gets to West Point eighteen thirty nine. He passes his entrance exams, even though he didn’t. He didn’t think he was going to He was nervous about it, but he did it with flying colors. I guess gets through West Point. You know. There are so many myths about his time at west Point, and specifically his performance as a cadet. They always talk about how he was bad as a cadet, but really he actually graduates about middle of his class. He’s not terrible, but he admits himself that he didn’t take his studies very seriously. He would spend a lot of his time reading novels. He read like James Fenimore Cooper novels, Washington, Irving and stuff. He is not charmed by military life. He’s kind of has He actually doesn’t really want to go to West Point at first, but his father makes him, you know, and while he’s there, he kind of There’s one point where he hopes there was some talk about Congress passing a bill that would have like hurt the funding for west and he was hoping that that would happen so he could just go home, you know, but it didn’t. As a matter of fact, even after he graduates, he doesn’t want to stay in the military. He wants to become an assistant math professor. H Yeah, he asked one of his former professors if he can get Hi an appointment as not a math professor, an assistant math professor. That’s what he wanted to do. He didn’t even really want to get into military life, but you know, circumstances dictate things, and in his case, it was the Mexican American War that kind of sealed his faith.
00:28:33
Speaker 2: Grant will go and fight in the Mexican American War and get his teeth sunk into the battlefield. But his attitude at West Point is interesting, contrasted by the environment of ambition around him. At that time, military involvement was a pathway to a career in politics and even business, and West Point was the pinnacle. He was the odd duck without ambition. However, later we’ll learn that he gained respect of almost that knew him.
00:29:01
Speaker 3: Though Grant wasn’t a top.
00:29:02
Speaker 2: Cadet, he was a study of people, and many of these cadets would become generals in the Confederate Army, and he’d use his personal knowledge of them to make judgment calls in battle. He seemed to know what they would do before they did us. Grant would become a master at the psychology of war. Apparently that doesn’t show up on aptitude tests. He could detect weakness and fear like a predator, prioritizing timing and speed even when outnumbered and out supplied. Grant was obscure but brilliant, all but slipping through the cracks of America’s top military training academy. When Grant rose to the top as the American General, his classmates were shocked, but oddly not surprised his greatness. It feels like just almost had a chance to have never arisen. If a very unique set of circumstances had and come about. After West Point, something significant happens that really muddies the water. As Brent says, you’ll have this kind of stuff on the big jobs.
00:30:11
Speaker 1: So after he graduates from West Point, he’s stationed in Saint Louis with Frederick Dent, this guy that he knows at Jefferson Barracks, and while he’s stationed there, this is in the mind you, this is in the mid eighteen forties, he travels to his buddy’s family home in Saint Louis white Haven, where he meets his future wife, Julia Dent. Now, this is where the story gets really interesting for Grant is because the Dent family is a slave owning family, the enslaved people at white Haven, and it’s a pretty substantial plantation. So you have Grant, a man who you know, comes from sort of like an abolitionist family now marrying into a slave owning family. And so that’s where it kind of implicates his story a little bit, right, because well, how do you deal how do you deal with this? Right? How do you deal with somebody who’s who’s accepting this lifestyle as being okay? You know? But that comes later.
00:31:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a climactic point in Grant’s life and this interview and this podcast, because he ends up marrying the slave owning Julia Dent. However, in this interview, my phone beings and a message comes through that there are mules out running the streets of my town, and it’s assumed that they’re mine. I’m seven hours away in Startville, Mississippi, and stress begins.
00:31:41
Speaker 3: To pour over me like a drug.
00:31:43
Speaker 2: We found ourselves completely sidetracked, but it gets better.
00:31:47
Speaker 3: We try to call somebody.
00:31:49
Speaker 1: I’m sorry, goodness, there’s a no, you’re fine.
00:31:53
Speaker 5: Sim mule mules, but it may not be mine, but it probably is that we can’t keep going here.
00:32:04
Speaker 1: Well, you know you mentioned mules. That’s a funny little anecdote. When we were working on the Grand Memoirs, I’m a real young editor, so I’m really I’m a go getter at this point, and I want to annotate everything, right, and so I’m making annotation on army mules during the Mexican American War because to me, this is interesting.
00:32:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I’m like, oh wow.
00:32:21
Speaker 1: Because I didn’t you know who studies army mules during this during the Mexican American War, right, Yeah. And I mean I was kind of going a little crazy writing these annotations, to the point where my colleague was like, hey, man, like we don’t need this, right, like page long annotations on army mules, and we cut most of them, but I did convince him to at least index it like the army mule mentions, and so it’s mentioned in the index of his memory.
00:32:47
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that’s a great addition.
00:32:49
Speaker 2: You know.
00:32:49
Speaker 3: You get a hold of him.
00:32:51
Speaker 2: No, nothing, just he texted me what needs to happen, and somebody needs to drive in my house and see if my mules are there. The escape The mules are hovering in my mind like a storm cloud.
00:33:02
Speaker 3: But the show must go on. We press forward.
00:33:06
Speaker 2: Grant has married into a slave owning family and ends up in the Mexican American War, fighting under the General Zachary Taylor, the future President Zachary Taylor. His influence on the young Grant is notable. I have no idea what I’m gonna do about these escape mules. It’s all I can think about.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: But what’s interesting about Taylor is that he’s really he’s a very unique style, both superficially and as a general. He is not well dressed. He doesn’t really care about uniform per se. He’s when he’s in battle, he kind of sits side saddle on his horse and kind of nonchalant. He’s very unassuming figure. There’s a story about Zachary Taylor where he’s you know, he’s in his camp and he’s like eating an apple or something, and someone walks up and they go, we’re looking for General Taylor, not knowing it’s him, and he says, I think he’s over there somewhere, right, So he’s very just kind of a nonchalant, informal guy, which you know, looking at Grant later on during his time as a general, you start to see some similarities in their appearances, right, Like, Grant isn’t about pomp and circumstance, right, Like, he’s he’s a very kind of casual guy himself. So you see that influence from Taylor.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: Grant would later say that he was heavily influenced by Zachary Taylor’s leadership. Also, of the generals who would fight in the Civil War, many of them also fought in the Mexican American War. It was here that the young Grant would meet the fifteen year older Robert E. Lee for the first time, and we know they’re going to meet again. Grant also fights under Winfield Scott, who would be the guy to create the Anaconda Plan designed to choke out the South via water in the Civil War. But goodness, gracious Misty walks through the door and says that our mules are safely in their pasture. They were, in fact, never out. This was a false alarm, fake news. Clays mules are in the pen, and I’m relieved. The interruptions are killing the Grant vibe. But as an equine man, I bet he’d understand.
00:35:15
Speaker 3: Oh, let me, let me.
00:35:16
Speaker 2: Text this guy a sorry man, You’re doing a wonderful this is perfect good, good good. This will relieve me greatly to tell this guy they’re not mules.
00:35:26
Speaker 1: That’s hysterical. It’s usually you know, it’s usually not not my circus, not my problem. This time it’s not my mule. It’s not my problem. That’s funny.
00:35:37
Speaker 2: Okay, Now I can be relaxed and talk about good good.
00:35:40
Speaker 1: The mules are safe them, We’re good, We’re good. Okay. So yeah, so Grant is with Scott when he takes Mexico City. So this is really Grant.
00:35:50
Speaker 2: You know, is he is he a general in the military at that time, right?
00:35:56
Speaker 1: No? Yeah, he’s just a quartermaster essentially at this point. But he’s worked his way up through the ranks. He gets a promotion a couple of times just through his actions.
00:36:05
Speaker 3: So he sees battle and the Mexican American War.
00:36:08
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he talks about the first time he you know that he’s a part of it. It’s when they crossed the Rio Grand in the north under Taylor and he’s they’re walking in formation towards towards the Mexican forces, and he says, at one point, you know, you know, shell comes basically bounces off the ground and takes off the head of the guy next to him, and so he saw the guy’s job bone got blown off too from it and everything like he saw. So he was seeing yea, he was, he was in it. He was in the fight. Yeah. Now, what’s interesting during the when they get to Mexico City, when they get close to it, at one point Grant this is really an important moment in his military career. He disassembles a howitzer and orders it to be sent up this church belfry so and then reassembles it and then uses it to basically, you know, to lay fire on the enemy from this elevated position like a cannon. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so’s it’s a yeah, like artillery piece kind of thing, right, So.
00:37:14
Speaker 2: He disassembled it, send it up a church, yeah, bettle tower.
00:37:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and then used it to as that elevated position to fire on me.
00:37:23
Speaker 2: He had a lot of just instinct about war. Yeah, not everybody would have had, Yeah, and I think.
00:37:28
Speaker 1: A willingness to try something that might not have been traditional at times, you know. And again you see that later on during the Civil War.
00:37:36
Speaker 2: As well, in a time of Napoleonic warfare tactics. Grant’s military strategy and innovation would be influential in modern war. He would become the guy you didn’t want to fight. In later years, some would call him a butcher because when the enemy was down, he would do what it would take to win during a time when chivalry sometimes prolonged wars. After the end of the Mexican American War in eighteen forty eight, he and Julia have their first child in Missouri, but Grant gets stationed away from them in California. This is the beginning of a terrible decade for Grant.
00:38:15
Speaker 1: The bad thing is he is now stationed out in California by himself. Yes he’s in the military, but he’s try to a make a living for himself, so he tries farming. I think he was tries selling ice at one point and everything kind of fails. The crops don’t grow really well, and he’s in a bad spot. You know, he’s got a kid in Saint Louis that he’s never seen, his namesake, Ulysses Grant Junior, and so he’s kind of down. This a low moment for great.
00:38:46
Speaker 3: He’s working side jobs while he’s in the military.
00:38:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he’s real low point in his life.
00:38:53
Speaker 3: How old would he be at this point.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: So if it’s eighteen fifty two, thirty thirty years old. Yeah, but because he’s missing his family and he’s isolated, he starts. The rumor is he starts. That’s when he starts to really drink, right, And this is pretty consistent with him throughout his life. Later on, Yeah, anytime there’s a low moment for him, or even not just a low moment, but like a quiet moment for him, that’s when he seemed to maybe take to the bottle a little bit.
00:39:20
Speaker 2: Being’s drinking or alcoholism would follow Grant his entire career, staining his reputation. The accounts are consistent enough over his life that it was real, but some of the stories are potentially exaggerated by political enemies and even the Lost Cause movement. He would go long stretches without any alcohol at all, But I think by today’s standards he would be considered an alcoholic. As a matter of fact, he resigned from the Army in eighteen fifty four because of his drinking in California during that rough decade, and it would seem this would end his military career, This resignation would continue you to plague him. And might I add that Grant is separated from Julia and their son, who he’s never met for over two years. So it’s the early eighteen fifties, he’s thirty years old, he’s in California, stationed in California, he’s working side jobs, trying to make make things work. His family and his son is back in Saint Louis and his Yeah, what I know about him? You know, it’s almost like he’s he just really struggles during this period from then until the Civil War.
00:40:40
Speaker 1: Yes, and it starts off west the We’ll call it a rumor because there’s not like solid evidence, but it’s it’s pretty clear that he was. He basically he was relieved of his command or resigned because of his drinking. Okay, again, it’s not it’s not written on paper anywhere. But it’s kind of the assumption is that that’s what happened, and it was it was time right. He needed to get back to his family anyway, and so he does. He goes back to Saint Louis with his family, finally meets his son, and yes, you’re nailed it perfectly. This in the fifties were rough for him. He’s trying to figure out his own life, his you know, his path, while also trying to take care of his family, this growing family. The military now, yes, yes he would have been no out the military.
00:41:25
Speaker 3: That so when he left California.
00:41:27
Speaker 1: Yes, he’s back to public regular life.
00:41:29
Speaker 3: Oh, he’s he’s done, He’s done.
00:41:33
Speaker 1: He tries to getting the farming obviously again going back to his wife and her family. They have a bunch of enslaved people. His father in law actually gives him an enslaved man named William Jones who’s about the same age as him, to help him farm. And so he’s struggling. You know, there are stories about him trying to sell firewood on the streets. At one point during around Christmas time, he pawns one of his Watt gold watches. He’s just he’s not doing well, he doesn’t have much money, and so eventually he has to move and work for his family in their leather goods store, eventually in Galeen, Illinois, where he ends up. But the enslaved man that he was given in I will say eighteen fifty nine.
00:42:18
Speaker 3: And where they add at this point they’re in miss I want to say, they’re in Missouri when that happens, they’re in a slave state.
00:42:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and he owns owns a man, yes, yes, But in eighteen fifty nine, and we have the manumission document, he gives William Jones his freedom. He doesn’t sell him, right, he lets him free at a time where he is pawning watches and has no money. He’s letting go the one thing of value at the time that he has. Now, mind you, I don’t know the exact numbers, but in today’s terms, like that’s like tens of thousands of dollars that he’s just letting go.
00:42:56
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:42:57
Speaker 1: And this is really interesting to me too, right, because you see this man who has in eighteen fifties, right, he’s married into a slave owning family. Right, So in eighteen fifty nine he has a slave. In eighteen fifty nine, right, but by eighteen seventy, not to jill forward again, by eighteen seventy he is already advocated for the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments, which ends slavery, makes them citizens, and gives them the right to vote in an eleven year timeframe. He evolved that much on this subject. To me, that just again it shows you, like the complicated nature of this man, right, and it shows you too how like people’s views can evolve, Right, you can change, you can you can grow in ways. Yeah, not to excuse well he did, but.
00:43:46
Speaker 2: The fact that he that he gave the guy his freedom, I mean, just speaks so much. Do we know anything about the details of that. Do we know anything about their personal relationship or did he speak about it in his memoir?
00:44:01
Speaker 1: So they would have been about the same age, which I think is interesting.
00:44:04
Speaker 2: It’s tellings you seem to connect with people that are your own age and a lot of times maybe more than somebody else. I mean, just because you’re like, this person has had some of the experiences I’ve had.
00:44:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s why you connected with that portrait in the gallery, Right, I told you of Grant when he was forty six. Yeah, he doesn’t talk much about He doesn’t talk about him at all. Really, there’s evidence that he would. He may have even worked alongside him in the fields. Maybe he got to know him then, right, that’s what I think. I think he just got to know this person and then probably felt some sort of guilt about it.
00:44:40
Speaker 2: I would say, you know, an interesting thought is to think about conversations that he would have had with his wife, who would have had a very different upbringing. I guess the nature of a husband wife relationship during that time might be different than today. Maybe they never had a conversation about it, but maybe they did, and he’s like, Hey, I’m gonna make a tough decision today. I’m gonna we’re gonna give this guy’s freedom. It’s gonna you know, we’re foregoing thousands of dollars that could help our well equivalent to thousands of dollars.
00:45:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:45:12
Speaker 1: So she wrote her own memoir, was not published. During her lifetime, she basically peddled the typical happy slave narrative, Right, Paul, they were like family to us. We fed them, we took care of them. Oh, I had one little jewels. She had a she had an enslaved girl when she was a girl named after her Julia. This is the slave’s name who did everything for her, obviously, but fun fact, when the emancipation proclamation is issued, Jewels, the enslaved woman leaves, runs, runs away from Julia, and she did not understand. She could understand, m M, I was with you my whole life, and we took care of her.
00:45:52
Speaker 3: Could you just leave me?
00:45:53
Speaker 2: She writes about this in her memoir, Yeah, oh yeah. She’s hurt that this the enslaved person after her left her after the emancipation proclamation.
00:46:02
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And she she writes about her early life as a kid with these enslaved children and how they would like. She talked about how one time her little schoolhouse was just down the road. She would sit in a chair and the enslaved children would pick her up and take her to the school and she thought that was just like so cute and funny, and I would go fishing with them and all like so yeah, for her, she has this rosary relationship. Why would they be upset about this? She can’t understand that maybe a person doesn’t want to be.
00:46:31
Speaker 2: Enslaved, So in eighteen ninety she still said that yes, oh yeah, so she probably didn’t move that far. Is that what you’re saying? Okay, so you do have an answer to my question. I would say this this mock conversation. She probably was like, what.
00:46:45
Speaker 1: Are you doing? Probably yeah, Now I’m assuming I don’t have any evidence for that, but yeah, I’m sure there would be a talk, a conversation about this choice. And now think about when the war breaks out, the conversations he would have had with his father in law, who he he didn’t just own a couple slaves, right, he owned he enslaved multiple people right in Missouri, in Missouri, right outside of Saint Louis. It’s well known in the in the Grand field that like around that time, he would have had conversations with his father in law in that dining room in that house in Saint Louis, talking about these these issues that are arising, right, and they obviously did not share the same opinions.
00:47:25
Speaker 3: Did he have a good relationship with his wife?
00:47:27
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, yes he did. Oh yes, they were they That was That’s one of the more famous love stories in the nineteenth century. I would say, yeah, yeah. In his memoirs he tells the courtship, the story of it beautifully, like He sets it up, talks about meeting her, talks about before going to the Mexican American War, he wants to go see her one last time, to give her a little engagement ring essentially, and this is this is a good interesting anecdote. So he gets close to the house and there’s a creek Grabois Creek I think is the name of it, and it’s flooded. It’s really high, and he’s on a horse and he’s like, well, I got to go see her. So he just goes through this creek the horse. He almost dies, He almost drowns trying to cross this creek with his horse.
00:48:11
Speaker 3: He had a mule.
00:48:13
Speaker 1: He should have had a mule. He would have been, well, I’m.
00:48:15
Speaker 3: Not going to die. A whole story, bro.
00:48:20
Speaker 1: But but he tells this story and his memoirs because it’s an example of his philosophy. He says, I decided, when I set out to do something, I’m going to do it and I’m not going to turn back. And you can see if you think of that line, you can see how that might inform his actions later on in his.
00:48:38
Speaker 3: Life would encompass his life and legacy.
00:48:40
Speaker 1: Especially as a general right, like think about the overland campaign in the East during the end of the war, when he’s just constantly flanking Lee, trying to get you know, around him. Most generals up to that point they would get try to attack him. Then you think of mc clellan, right, they would back out. Grant just kept going right once he set out, he did not he did it. He was a pretty pretty accurate statement, I would say from him.
00:49:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, Grant and Julia adored each other.
00:49:06
Speaker 2: But Grant’s father in law despised him, and once the war started he told Grant that he’d shoot him like a rabbit if he and his men came on the Dent farm in Missouri. And another thing that I haven’t told yet is that Julia was cross eyed. She often insisted that pictures be taken of her from the side, not from the front, and this would hide her crossed eyes. During Grant’s presidency, when she knew that she’d be in the public spotlight more and more, she consulted a doctor about a surgery to fix her eyes, and she recorded in her memoirs what her husband told her. He says, did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now remember you are not to interfere with them.
00:49:54
Speaker 3: They are mine.
00:49:55
Speaker 2: And let me tell you, miss Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well. With any other eyes, I’d say that’s really special. There was a data point to Grant’s character. How a man treats his wife as a huge indication of his character. Julia would be the first one to believe in Grant and see his potential for greatness when everything else just showed failure. In the late eighteen fifties, during this very tough decade full of failures, an older slave woman recalled Julia telling her that she Julia had had a dream that Ulysses became the president of the United States, and she knew that it would be true. Talk about prophetic. No one saw this coming, but Julia somehow did. That’s interesting. We’ve got to talk more about Grant’s involvement with slavery.
00:50:56
Speaker 3: Before the war.
00:50:57
Speaker 1: He would have again, he was kind of obviously indifferent.
00:51:00
Speaker 3: Was formulating his real opinions.
00:51:03
Speaker 1: I mean, he was okay enough with accepting William Jones right, think of that, right, So so he wasn’t He was not and he would say this himself. I think he says it in the memoirs. He was not an abolitionist at the time, obviously, but as the war progresses, as he gets older, as he gets more experienced, he starts to change his views start to change on this, especially during the war.
00:51:26
Speaker 2: Well, it probably informed him in a really powerful way. Yeah, because if you if if you actually had engaged in this thing and seen it for yourself and knew what it felt like to own another human and make them do work for you and not pay them and control their life, and he was like, hey, this isn’t right, and then he made a decision that hurt him financially and maybe put him in some jeopardy. I mean, that’s pretty powerful, powerful and certainly would have informed the rest of his life more than if that wasn’t in the store. Like, to me, that’s not even a fly in the ointment, you know. I Mean, it’s like that’s what made him. And it feels like even more than someone that was like, no, I’ve never been a part of this. This is this peculiar institution. They have nothing to do with. I don’t know you, just like this guy was there, saw it. I mean, there’s a lot of redemption in that idea.
00:52:22
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, yes, an empathy in all this too, right, Like, I think that’s the key part of it. I think it’s the empathy part.
00:52:28
Speaker 2: In April eighteen sixty one, the Civil War begins, and Grant has been out of the military for seven years, farming, selling firewood, and working at his father’s tannery business. He built a log cabin that he called hard scrabble. He’s struggling in life. He’s a letdown to his own father and his father in law, who believed his daughter.
00:52:49
Speaker 3: Had married a deadbeat Yankee.
00:52:51
Speaker 2: Grant becomes enlivened when he sees the Southern States seceed, and he can’t believe that many of his fellow West Point graduates are leading the trees in this rebellion. As a matter of fact, one of Robert E. Lee’s favorite generals, James Longstreet, was one of Grant’s best men in he and Julia’s wedding, and long Street and Grant remained friends before and after the war. At this point, Grant leading the entire army would be as likely as me entering the NBA. This was on nobody’s mind.
00:53:25
Speaker 1: This is his chance now to get back into the military. You know, the way he looks at it. He’s got great experience. Gradually, he’s a West Point graduate. He fought the Mexican American War. Why not, right, this is a great opportunity.
00:53:37
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:53:37
Speaker 2: So he’s been out of the military for about a decade. Yeah, the war starts and he’s like, well, I’ll go back in. Would he go back in as a not as a general?
00:53:48
Speaker 1: So he tried to get he couldn’t get a commission at first. He had to raise a regiment of volunteers, which he did. He did a really good job at it.
00:53:54
Speaker 3: He had to recruit troops to come in.
00:53:56
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, a volunteer regiment. Yeah, okay, Yeah, and so he’s he’s leading this regiment. This is actually really this is another really good anecdote that kind of uh yeah, his leadership style during the war. Right, So this is this is in oh gosh, I want to say it’s in Missouri. He’s chasing down this Confederate group of soldiers and he knows where they’re camped. They’re camped over this hill, right, And he talks about this in his memoirs, and this is his first time he’s going to face battle during the Civil War, and he says, man, I said, we’re going up over this hill. I’m starting to get starts to get so nervous. I feel it feels like my heart is in my throat. He’s freaking out. And they get up over the crest of the hill and they look down and the camp’s gone, and he, you know, his heart resumed, It went back to his place, he said, and he goes. But I learned a valuable lesson in this, he said. I learned that the enemy is is just as afraid of me as I am afraid of them. And from that point on, he said, I never felt any sort of like fear or anxiety going into a battle. Really.
00:55:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he just the fact that they were gone, they were gone, they fled. When they fled, recognize.
00:55:14
Speaker 2: So he equated his fear with they must have had equal equal fear, and it vanquished his fear.
00:55:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s unique.
00:55:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he’s saying a lot of people deal with anxiety in all kinds of different things in ways.
00:55:27
Speaker 3: We know that good.
00:55:28
Speaker 2: And so when you hear how somebody overcomes something, especially when you think about the consequences of war, that is interesting.
00:55:36
Speaker 1: I like that.
00:55:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, overcoming anxiety can often just simply be mentally reframing a situation. The mind is powerful. The Bible talks about the renewal of the mind. And I’ve got a question about how important leadership is. This seems like a good time to ask. As Grant is about to climb his way to the top of the US military, prepare for a sports analogy. Inside of basketball NBA team, sometimes the talent is so great that you wonder how much the coach influences what’s going on on the court. And you see these coaches that win year after year, and and you kind of start to understand the dynamics of leadership and how powerful this because I mean, sometimes you see this NBA team and you’re just like, man.
00:56:27
Speaker 3: I could coach those guys to THEBA title.
00:56:29
Speaker 2: That’s what it feels like, because you got this young coach over there, and sometimes they mike up them in the huddle and they’re saying stuff like I said to my son’s pee wee league.
00:56:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, come on, got to stick together. But then you know, as you.
00:56:46
Speaker 2: Dive into it, you realize that the power of leadership, the power of what these guys are actually doing. Same thing in military battle with a general. Sometimes it’s like, well, whoever has the most guys and the most worst is in the most gunpowder is going to win. But there’s like an incredible amount of strategy, an incredible amount of leadership that these guys, especially during the Civil War.
00:57:12
Speaker 3: You know, they’re they’re talking to people.
00:57:15
Speaker 2: They’re who they are is really coming through inside of the battles and stuff.
00:57:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, and here’s my question to you. How much does a general matter in a civil war battle?
00:57:25
Speaker 1: Yeah? I would say they mentally. Right now, I have to admit, I’m I have never been in the military, so I might be speaking out of turn, right, but my.
00:57:35
Speaker 3: Perception I’ve never been in the NBA.
00:57:39
Speaker 1: Well, my perception is that it’s very important, right because you think of somebody. Let’s look the opposite side of the coin. Robert E. Lee right again, doesn’t have his he he doesn’t get fresh troops coming in all the time, he doesn’t have the same amount of supplies. But look at the success he has for the first couple of years of the war, right, Like, Yeah, that showed that shows you the value of a good general, especially a good general who knows tactics. Right, Like, like Robert E. Lee, you could another example going backwards in American history, look at the American Revolution. You know the story of these poor little farmers, this small group of colonists taking on the largest military navy in the world, and they defeat them. Yeah, right, with way less reason. Now they’re fighting a defensive war, and it’s a different politics, and there’s stuff happening in Europe. All that very complicated, but it shows you that, you know, it’s not just about Yeah, it’s not just about military resources and power like that. Like you know, you have to have a good leader, not just tactically, not just strategically, but like as a leader, right, Like, so you think of Grant, going back to Zachary Taylor, the kind of informal style, not about pomp and circumstance. Think of how a soldier in the trenches relates to somebody like that, who’s who looks like them, Who’s who’s with them right during the during the battle. You know, so I think that has a huge influence.
00:59:03
Speaker 2: Would those guys have known Grant, I mean, would he have been like talking to soldiers, Yeah, yeah, he’d been fairly exposed to, like just a common lieutenant in the military.
00:59:13
Speaker 1: Yes, oh yes.
00:59:15
Speaker 2: The power of leadership is real, and coaching on the battlefield, it’s real. Inside of your business, your career, it’s real inside of your home. Grant would ascend from the bottom rung of the latter to the top one hundred percent by merit in a time of many many politically appointed generals. He came into the view of Lincoln, who wouldn’t have known him from anywhere else about midway through the war, after the forty seven day Siege of Vicksburg, which displayed as incredible military mind, grit, and determination. Vicksburg put him on the map, and they’re still talking about it down there today. At this time, General McClellan was the top Union commander, known for his lack of action. Lincoln was pulling out his hair because he couldn’t find a general that wasn’t afraid of Robert E. Lee. One of the most interesting things about Grant is the way he carried himself as a general, which was in contrast to so many other people that had these big egos, wanted to look like generals, wanted to be called sir. I mean common things that would have been accepted. But Grant stood in contrast to that. Can can you describe that to me.
01:00:29
Speaker 1: Certainly, to me, the main talking point that most people give is that he didn’t have political aspirations after the war, Right you think of someone like McClellan, it was clear, I mean he ran for president, right, he clearly had other ambitions, right, And most people did, most of these generals did. I mean, that’s why there was think about how many political generals there were appointed by Lincoln and how they and how that their interests may conflict with what they’re going to do as a general. For Grant, it’s the opposite. As a matter of fact, he I think he writes a letter to his wife pretty early on in the war where he says, I just want to bring this to an end so I can come back home and start farming and living my life again, you know what I mean, Like he had no aspirations, at least on the surface. Maybe he did privately and he didn’t write it down, you know, But I think that’s the biggest thing that informs his leadership style, right, is that there are so many of these men who are not pulling the trigger because they don’t want to risk losing their reputation. You have to understand at this time, like if you do something wrong during the war, your reputation is over. It’s ruined. It’s really hard to come back from it. Right.
01:01:39
Speaker 2: And so if you had aspirations beyond the war in politics, and you’re a bad general, or you get defeated in some war that’s broadcast all over the country, your name is associated with something bad.
01:01:51
Speaker 3: That this happened.
01:01:51
Speaker 1: So think of this. A man named lou Wallace during the Battle of Shilah. So the first day the Confederates they launched this attack on the suspecting Union troops at Shiloh. Grant responds, he tries to, you know, get his lines in order, and he orders one of his generals, Lou Wallace, to kind of make a route around the left flank of the Confederates. It’s hard to tell what exactly happened, but essentially he took the wrong road and was not where he was supposed to be when the battle was happening. Now, this ruins his reputation, and it was it was such a stain on his character and his reputation, and he spent the rest of his life defending it. This one day, there’s one action.
01:02:32
Speaker 3: So that crippled some of these guys, but it didn’t cripple in.
01:02:36
Speaker 1: My opinion, Yeah, I would say that. Yeah, But Lou Wallas wrote one more thing. He actually he did redeem himself a little bit. He wrote Ben Hur that the movie is based on Oh really, Yeah, so I think that’s that’s an interesting little redemption arc there.
01:02:49
Speaker 2: But yeah, so he made it in Hollywood, yeah before it exists, to make it as in general and made it in Hollywood.
01:02:56
Speaker 3: Okay, I got it.
01:02:57
Speaker 1: It’s fought on. But yeah, so I think that’s kind of the biggest difference between Grant and these other men. I do think personality plays a big part of this as well, Like you alluded to that, right, I think there is a willingness on his part that other people don’t have, and not just because of their reputation, but just because out of you know, indecisiveness or yeah, they’re just not sure if it’s going to work, and so they hesitate a little bit, you know. But I also think what helped him in his generalship. He was very blunt and clear in his orders. All right. If you go and look at say McClellan his writings during the war, Oh my gosh, it’s like this flowery, poetic prose.
01:03:45
Speaker 3: He was trying to be a gal.
01:03:46
Speaker 1: Oh, he was trying to be the most impressive person you’ve ever seen, as opposed to Grant, who was just like cross the bridge, go there now, like he was very plains but very clear cut. And he talks about I want to say it was Taylor was the same way, very plain spoken in his orders and this is important right And Grant talks about this in his memoirs where but he gives this example, there’s a general where his orders are indecisive. For example, once you reach this bridge, if you can take it, take it right. Grant, on the other hand, would say, once you reach this bridge, take it. See like he was very clear cut in what he wanted his generals to do.
01:04:29
Speaker 2: Grant would say that indecisiveness in war was the worst thing. A wrong decision was better than a delayed decision because you’d more quickly find the right answer and do it. And Grant’s lack of ambition was undoubtedly a huge part of his high level of performance. What Grant wanted to do was when the war stopped the fighting and restore the union. Some called him a butcher because of how effective he did his job. He’d become the author of total war. He viewed clear and decisive victory as the quickest way to end the bloodshed. The South had to be destroyed and then rebuilt from the ground up. And though he didn’t start here, he’d also come to believe that slavery had to once and for all be stamped out.
01:05:19
Speaker 3: Through this war, or other wars would be fought in the future.
01:05:34
Speaker 2: There is more to come on the final episode of our Civil War Summer. I can’t thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share a podcast with a friend this week. Thanks for listening to Brent’s This Country Life and Lakes Backwoods University, and as always
01:05:54
Speaker 3: Keep the wild places wild because that’s where the bears live.
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