Thank you so much
for being here.
Tonight's a real treat
for all of us.
We've had Bill Brands come
back a number of times.
I think seven times that
he's been here with us.
You know, the comment that I
get again and again in my
professional life is people will
come up to me and they'll
say, you know, if I only knew
how fun history really is, how
great history is.
Because almost universally,
people complain that when they
were in school and we can turn
down the microphone just a
little bit.
When they were in school, it
was boring; names and dates
memorized and that
kind of thing.
And then, people get older and
they realize what the stakes
are and they really
enjoy history.
And why do they enjoy history?
Because there are master
historians who in essence, are
master storytellers.
So the comment that I get again
and again, bring Bill
Brands back because he's one of
those master storytellers.
And so that's what we're
doing tonight.
We're bringing Bill back.
He's developed I think four key
audiences in our country
as one of the leading
biographers and
historians of our day.
He's developed an audience of
course with pupils-- every one
of these is going
to start with P.
You'll see my theme here.
He's developed an audience
with pupils, students, he
teaches at the University
of Texas-Austin.
He's a very sought out
professor; a professor in
demand because of the way he
teaches history and makes
history come alive.
We talk a lot about
his teaching.
His students are
very fortunate.
He also has developed an
audience with the public.
And he's done that by writing
a number of books.
Just to take a series of books
that he's written about the
presidents and famous
founders.
So for example, if you want to
read about Benjamin Franklin
or if you want to read about
Andrew Jackson, Theodore
Roosevelt, if you want to read
about Franklin Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson, turn
to Bill Brands.
You're going to get the best
story about these presidents
and about Franklin.
He's also written though, books
about our politics,
liberals and conservatives.
He's written books about our
economy with great insight.
So he's developed a great
following with the public.
He's also cultivated an audience
with-- here's the
third P, the presidents
of the United States.
Yes, this man, your speaker
tonight, has been invited to
the White House.
He's briefed President
George W.
Bush and he's had two dinners
with President Obama.
And he's offered some very
interesting answers.
I got to be a little bit of an
interloper by hearing some of
the stories from the
Obama White House.
So he's developed that.
And then the fourth P that he
has developed is with poets.
Yes, with poets.
And if you'll indulge
me-- yes, poets.
If you go onto H.W.
Brand's website, it's
hwbrands.com, you're
going to see haiku.
And some of it's actually
quite interesting.
And if you want, you can even
follow the haiku on Twitter.
So you're going to have a whole
bunch of new Twitter
accounts there.
Let me read for you just
a couple of these
so you get a flavor.
About the great awakening Bill
said this, "New lights and new
hearts/ New preachers from new
pulpits/ awaken the world."
Not bad haiku.
King Phillip's War from 1670:
"Terror in the night/ blood
and slaughter in the day/ horror
on the land." Not bad.
But my favorite is
about Columbus.
"The white ships appear/ the
bearded ones come ashore/ who
the hell are they?"
Bill Brands is a Pulitzer
Prize finalist
for two of his books.
I think we ought to nominate him
for his haiku for Pulitzer
Prize poetry.
But let me try in my own
clumsy way a little
haiku for you Bill.
Our bard journeys back/ to
regale us with stories/ too
long forgotten.
Ladies and gentlemen, please
join me in welcoming H.W.
Brands.
[APPLAUSE]
Well I'm delighted to be back
in Grand Rapids and at the
Ford Museum and with the
Hauenstein Center.
One of the reasons I enjoy
coming back so much is that
Gleaves is always so flattering
when I get here.
I think I owe it to myself and
maybe to you to explain how
the haikus came about.
I've been teaching American
history for, oh gosh, I guess
30 years now and over the course
of that time, I present
my students-- they have to
write papers for me.
They write a lot for me.
And so I give them tips on how
to configure their papers the
most effective way.
I tell them it's critical for
any writer to figure out who
the audience is and what
the expectations of
the audience is.
And so I say that if you're
writing a novel, audiences
expect one thing.
If you're writing a seminar
paper in history, audience
expect something else.
And I give them a template
for writing an
effective research paper.
The model is an academic
article.
And I say that this article
ought to be-- oh about 7,000
words or so.
And it ought to have an
introduction that's maybe 400
words long.
And you ought to break it up
into a certain number of
sections that'll make it easier
to digest. And so you
can organize your thoughts
more effectively.
And I tell them that I'm not
going to actually require you
to follow this template.
I'm going to encourage
you to do so.
I will tell you that in the
past, students who had used
this template have tended
to write better papers
than those who don't.
And it has a lot to do with
the expectations.
When you're reading a certain
kind of paper you expect to
see certain things in
certain places.
But I always would say that if
you think that you want to do
it your own way, if your genius
is such that it cannot
be confined to this kind of
model, then go ahead.
It's my belief that you can
write, for example, any
historical subject
at any length.
You can write the history of
the world at 800 words or 8
million words.
It's just a matter of the level
of detail and what you
expect to get in there.
And as a throwaway line, for
years, I would say you know,
if you want to write your
history paper in the form of
haiku, go ahead.
And it was just a throwaway
line until about three
or four years ago.
One of my students said, well,
Professor Brands have you ever
tried writing a haiku?
And I said, well,
no, I hadn't.
But then I thought about it and
I thought, yeah, well OK.
Why not?
And it was just about this
time-- I don't how many of you
use Twitter, but for those who
don't, it's this form of very
quick, short messages and you
limit yourself to 140
characters.
And so I thought I have been--
the writer in me wants to
reach out to audiences and
broader audiences.
And one hesitates to guess the
ages of people, but I look out
in the audience this evening.
And I'm trying to think if I'm
going to have a reading
audience 20 years from now, 30
years now, I'm going to have
to find some younger people than
are occupying some of the
seats here.
So we writers, we take
our message to
where the readers are.
And Twitter is a way young
people communicate.
And it just so happens that
the 140 characters is
sufficient that you can pretty
easily get a haiku in there.
The 17 syllables of a haiku:
5 syllables, 7
syllables, 5 syllables.
So I thought, why not
combine these two.
So I started and I thought, well
this will be fun; just do
it as a lark.
So I started writing American
history at the beginning.
And the first one, the first
installment was about the
migrations from Asia
to North America.
And it's been going on.
It's fun.
When I have just a spare moment
when I'm on a plane I
just think, OK, so
what can I write
about the Great Awakening?
Well, I can do this.
So anyhow, it's taken on kind
of a life of its own.
Now I realize I'm digressing
and I'll
get back to the subject.
But I was talking with my editor
at Random House in New
York last fall.
And I told her I
was doing this.
She said that's really
interesting because she's
looking for stuff to publish.
And I thought, you know,
maybe-- and I was just
thinking out loud
at this point.
I said, well, I've been
thinking about adding
illustrations to this.
And so doing sort of a picture
book, maybe for young adults
or something like this.
But instead of having just the--
I mean I hesitate to say
the dumbed down captions you
get in picture book.
How about adding a little bit
of a literary touch to this.
And the captions would
be these haiku.
So I had a bunch of-- I
had maybe the first 20
installments of the haiku.
And I found illustrations
for this.
And so I started putting
together this combination
picture book, haiku book.
And I liked doing it at first.
But then, then I decided you
know, there's something about
the pictures the tends to
detract from-- I would say
actually overwhelm the words.
Because sort of if you see
something, then when you try
to sort of paint the picture
with the words, you've either
inserted a kind of redundancy
if they go together or a
contradiction if they don't.
So I gave up the pictures and
it's just going to be haiku
all the way.
Anyhow, now I have not yet
gotten in my haiku history of
the United States-- I've gotten
up to, I think-- oh,
we're writing the
Constitution.
So I'll let you know
how it turns out.
Or you can tune in
and find out.
But anyway, I haven't gotten up
to Ulysses Grant, which is
the topic of discussion
tonight.
Now I'm going to tell you a
little bit about why I wrote
on Ulysses Grant, why I'm
writing about Ulysses Grant.
I was speaking at the reception
before this about
how I embark on this subject
with a bit of trepidation.
Because I do not consider myself
by any means to be an
expert on the Civil War.
And there are a lot of experts
on the Civil War out there.
And they come with knives and
the knives are sharpened.
And they all have their opinions
and they all have not
just opinions, opinions
are easy to deal with.
They all have lots of facts.
And the facts are
harder to deny.
The opinions you
can object to.
And I don't pretend to be
a military historian.
And I know that there are people
with strong opinions
and lots of facts about Ulysses
Grant, Robert E.
Lee, William Sherman.
You pick your favorite Civil
War general and your battle
and your campaign and there
are going to be people out
there, probably people in the
audience tonight who know a
lot more about this
subject than I do.
So we launch into these new
fields, as I say, with a bit
of hesitation.
But it's what makes it
all interesting.
It's why I do this stuff.
It can't be any worse than when
I launched into the field
of Texas history.
I wrote a book about
Texas history.
I'm not a Texan.
In Texas, I don't know what
the rule is in Michigan.
But in Texas, every seventh
grader in the state take this
Texas history class.
And it inculcates in the
students, those elements of
Texas history and myth that are
required for anybody who
pretends to be a Texan.
And I wasn't in Texas in
the seventh grade.
And so there's a lot of stuff
that is just common knowledge
that I don't have.
Now I have to think that I bring
something to the study
of Texas history that they don't
have. I mean, I've got
to bring something.
And I bring the perspective
of an outsider.
Which often, I think, the fact
that the most trenchant
commentary on America democracy
was written by Alexi
de Tocqueville, a Frenchman,
a foreigner.
Very often the foreign eyes, the
outsider's eyes give you a
perspective that the insider's
don't have.
Nonetheless, when I write about
the Battle of the Alamo
there is, I would call it a
cottage industry, it's a
mansion industry in Texas.
There are people who know
everything about the Battle of
the Alamo, including-- I mean
there are a lot of seventh
graders who know more about
the Battle of the
Alamo than I do.
So I would talking to audiences
and they would ask
me things and I'd try to-- I
didn't know what they were
talking about and I would
try to retreat.
Well, in fact, there was one
time when I was giving a
lecture to seventh graders.
How hard can it be to lecture
to seventh graders?
OK, and so the teachers who
brought the seventh graders in
said, well, would it be OK
if they ask questions?
Of course, I'm a teacher.
This is what we do, we
answer questions.
I didn't realize that she had
made the assignment to be a
version of stump the chump.
Where you've got to come up
with a question that the
professor can't answer.
So I figured, they're seventh
graders, what do they know?
So I gave my 20 minute talk
and I'll be happy
to take your questions.
First question, Professor
Brands-- now one of the
charming things about seventh
graders is their utter lack of
perspective on what's important
and what's not.
When you've been in the business
for a while as a
historian, I have an idea that
there's certain things that
are important, big issues, big
questions and other things
that might be interesting, but
they're historical trivia.
But with seventh graders, there
is none of that kind of
perspective.
And if you know this and
you don't know that,
well, you're an idiot.
So anyhow, first question:
"Professor Brands, what was
Sam Houston's middle name?"
What are you going to do?
All right, I'll tell
you what you do.
You think fast. You put on
your professor face.
How can I do this?
Now those of us who are in the
teaching business, we have
what we like to think of as
these teaching moments when
you've got your students
attention.
Oh, I had their attention.
They were waiting to see what
I was going to say.
They thought they had me.
No, I wasn't going to retreat.
I was going to say,
well, this is a
very interesting question.
First of all, I had
no idea what Sam
Houston's middle name.
I was pretty sure that Sam
Houston did not have a middle
name, but those of you who are
versed in philosophy know it's
kind of hard to prove
a negative.
There's nothing that says, Sam
Houston never wrote an
affidavit and signed it that
says I have no middle name.
So I would have to infer this
from something else.
But I didn't want to do that.
And I realized that would be
considered sort of a weasel
answer and utterly
unsatisfactory.
So I thought fast and I said--
oh, and I did know that Sam
Houston had run away from home
at the age of-- and this is
where you have to bring
your audience in.
At the age of-- why, about
the same age you all are.
And how old are you?
You know, working
for time here.
And he ran off to live with
the Cherokees because he
didn't like his-- his mother was
asking him to do stuff he
didn't want to do.
So he ran off.
And I said-- and I knew this.
The wheels are spinning.
And I knew that the Cherokees
had fiven him a Cherokee name
that translates to raven.
And so I said, I suppose we
could say that Sam Houston's
middle name was raven.
They were kind of skeptical.
They were like you.
They're not sure.
I'm not going to buy
that or not.
So I thought a little
bit more.
I said, well, OK.
Well then, when Sam Houston came
to Texas, which he did in
1832, he was required by Mexican
law-- Texas was part
of Mexico at the time.
He was surprised by Mexican law
to convert to Catholicism.
That was part of the deal.
You come to Texas, you come to
Mexico-- Texas, you have to be
baptized in the Roman
Catholic church.
And the typical practice was
to take on a saint's name.
Now I did remember seeing in my
research for the Texas book
something that was signed-- it
was a contract that was signed
Sam Pablo Houston because
he had taken the
saint's name, Paul.
And so I said, so I guess we
could say that Pablo was his
middle name.
And I said, you know what?
I think that ends the
question period.
Thank you very much.
Well, aside from the wonderful
work that Gleaves is doing at
the Hauenstein Center, one of
the reasons that I really like
to come to Grand Rapids and
the Hauenstein Center is
Gleaves gives me an opportunity
to try out ideas
on audiences just like you.
I've been working on Ulysses
Grant for, I guess, three or
four years now.
The book is not finished.
The book will be published
if all goes well
about a year from now.
So there's still work
to be done.
But I haven't figured everything
out and I haven't
figured out answers to some
sort of basic questions.
Basic questions of motivation.
I've got the facts
all lined up.
But what one makes of the
facts is another matter.
So I'm going to share with you
sort of-- beyond preliminary,
intermediary thoughts
on Ulysses Grant and
what this all means.
And to get at that though, I'm
going to tell you a little bit
about why I decided to
take on this project.
Now in one sense, I took on the
project because I needed
to write a biography of a
mid 19th century figure.
You might well ask, why?
Because I have been working on a
history of the United States
through the form, through
the genre of biography.
And I've been working on this
for the last 15 years.
And this because some years
ago, many years ago, I
proposed a multi-volume history
of the United States
to a publisher and the publisher
just laughed at me.
Nobody writes multi-volume
histories.
Nobody reads multi-volume
histories.
And this, and I think the
publisher, the editor, might
well have know what he was
talking about because well, in
my experience when I talk to
audiences, if I say that I'm
working on a history of this or
that, as soon as the word
history comes out of my mouth
there is very often this far
away look that enters the eyes
as the listeners recall that
course they had in high school
where they can't remember much
about the material, but they
knew it had something to do
with matching events in column
A with dates in column B.
And the teachers last name,
they can't remember the
teachers last name, but the
teachers first name was coach.
This is something that I've
got to work against. So I
decided that even though I
couldn't write a history of
the United States in six
volumes, well, at least not
and call it that.
What I could write was
a series of connected
biographies.
Because people-- when I talk
to people and I say I'm
working on the life of Ulysses
Grant, I'm working on the life
of Andrew Jackson.
Oh, Andrew Jackson
[INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, OK.
Not a history.
Get the word history
out of their.
History has these negative
connotations.
But lives, people like to read
about people's lives.
You know this is like what's the
celebrity TV station E or
something like that where
you gossip about
the rich and famous.
Well that's sort of what we
do in the biography trade.
And we do more than
gossip, but we get
into people's lives.
We tell you all about them.
I'll tell you, my students, the
lecture they like best of
all when I talk about this is
the love lives of Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt.
And I often don't finish by
the time the bell rings.
I've got to kick them
out of there.
So, is she really?
Anyhow.
So anyhow, I've been working
on this series and I had
written-- volume one in the
series is Benjamin Franklin,
volume two in the series
is Andrew Jackson.
And they're chosen so that
they're these big figures that
can carry the story forward.
My biographies are
lives and times.
And there's an overlap between
the characters.
So Benjamin Franklin
dies in 1790.
Andrew Jackson was
born in 1767.
He's becoming an adult
by the time Benjamin
Franklin leaves the scene.
Andrew Jackson dies in 1845.
And that's volume two
in the series.
I had written volume four in the
series; this was Theodore
Roosevelt who graduates
from college in 1880.
So I've got this gap to cover
between 1845 and 1880.
And this gap's a big gap.
It's an important gap in
American history, includes the
Civil War and Reconstruction
among other things.
So who am I going to use?
Who am I going to choose?
Well, I suppose one could choose
Abraham Lincoln who
would be an obvious one, but
while I was thinking about
this, this was-- you may
or may not be aware.
You probably remember, maybe
you don't, but 2009 was the
bicentennial of Abraham
Lincoln's birth.
And every third historian and
biographer in the United
States had a Lincoln
book that came out.
So the market was
rather crowded.
Besides, I won't say that
Lincoln is over done.
I mean, a great figure,
an important figure.
And a story that's worth telling
is worth retelling.
But for my purposes, he doesn't
suffice because he dies.
He's killed in 1865.
So it doesn't allow me to get
the coverage that I need.
So I decided to look
at Ulysses Grant.
And I didn't choose him
primarily because he was a
general and the president,
actually my first choice for a
general was not Ulysses Grant,
it was William Sherman.
And I was thinking about this,
in fact, I had just written
about Andrew Jackson when I was
thinking about who I might
do to cover the Civil War era.
And I was on a book
tour promoting the
Andrew Jackson book.
These book tours are airport,
hotel, bookstore, hotel,
airport, bookstore and so on.
And after a while you kind of
lose track of where you are.
And I was talking to an audience
trying to figure out,
OK, who should be my coverages
of the Civil War.
Who should be the sequel
to the Andrew Jackson?
And it was an audience
that was-- it was a
very receptive audience.
They were with me.
They were listening.
You know, laugh at my jokes
and doing all that stuff.
And so then I started thinking
out loud, who's my next
subject going to be?
And I said, you know, there's
a Civil War general who has
intrigued me.
In part because he's such
a complicated character.
A military genius, but a very
complicated character.
And there's a real dark streak
to his personality.
And this is William Sherman.
And as soon as I said William
Sherman the warmth in the room
just vanished and the
temperature dropped 25 degrees
in just seconds.
And then I thought, wait
a minute, where am I?
Oh, I'm in Atlanta.
Bad move.
Well, I realized I was going
to have a hard time selling
books on William Sherman
in the South.
So, I gave up Sherman and
decided to focus on Grant.
And I decided to look at Grant
for a couple of reasons.
And one of the reasons is
related to my teaching.
As a basic premise, I consider
my writing to be an extension
of my teaching.
My readers are my classroom
kind of writ large.
And very often, the ideas that
come out in my books are ideas
that I've been trying on my
students for a while.
And the longer I teach, the more
I have concluded that the
fundamental questions
of history are very
few, but very basic.
And one of the most basic
questions and this is a
question I ask of my students
every semester.
In fact, one of the things I
do at the very beginning of
the semester, I tell them this
is going to be one of or the
question on the final.
So be prepared to answer it.
And the question is,
why is there war?
War is probably the most common,
the most-- except for
sex, maybe-- it is the most
ubiquitous human activity.
There is no society that anybody
has encountered that
hasn't engaged in war in
one form or another.
Big societies have big wars,
small societies sometimes have
small wars.
But everybody does it.
And the question is, why?
And from the perspective of
American history, I pose to my
students the question
in this form.
I say, why is it, how is it that
a peace-loving people,
namely us, Americans, and I
believe that Americans are
sincerely desirous of peace.
How is it that a peace-loving
people has over the course of
the last 200 years, gone to war
more often than any other
country in the world?
What's going on here?
And I pose the questions
to my students, for my
undergraduates, my
undergraduates are typically--
the average age is
about 20 or 21.
And I look around the room.
And at first I focus on,
point my finger at
young men like you.
And I look at the young men
in the audience and I say,
historically, you-- you, 20, 21
year olds are the soldiers
of history.
The average age of soldiers in
history is probably about your
age, maybe even a little
bit younger.
It's young men who
go off to fight.
And every generation this
happens and it goes back as
far as we can tell in history.
Why is this so?
Why does this happen?
And briefly, the young women
in my classes, they get to
feel they're off the hook.
But not for long.
Because then I look at them
and I say, why do you
encourage them to
go off to war?
Because you know, if you didn't
get that bright look in
your eye when they put on the
uniform, if they didn't think
that being a hero in war would
allow them to come home and
impress you.
If you told them I don't
like soldiers they
wouldn't go off to war.
So you're as complicit
in this as they are.
So my question again is, why?
And I put it to them,
why do you do it?
Why historically, do you,
people of your age and
generation, do what people
of my age and
generation tell you to do?
It's people of my age who say--
we make the decision our
country's going to go to war.
But we don't go of and
fight ourselves.
We tell you to go
off and fight.
So what's going on here?
Is it that people of my age are
really good at pulling the
wool over your eyes
and getting you to
do our dirty work?
Is that it?
Is it that we hold out
the prospect that
you can be a hero?
You can be famous.
You can be really cool.
And that you find
that attractive.
Is it somehow a test
of your manhood?
What's going on here?
Now I tell the students
that there's no one
answer to this question.
There are probably-- there are
certainly at least as many
answers as there are
individuals.
In fact, there are probably
multiple times as many answers
because people do things,
important things like this not
for single reasons, they do
them for multiple reasons.
And so, my students
work on this.
In one of my classes I have
them actually pick a war.
Pick a war, explain how
the war came about.
Explain why the decision
was made by the
government to go to war.
Explain why people enlisted
in the army after the
decision was made.
This is the question that I've
been thinking about.
And the answers fall in a
variety of categories, but I
sort of use dichotomies
to get at this.
And one pair of dichotomies, one
dichotomy is-- and I ask
them this, is war when
things go wrong?
Is war what happens when
diplomacy breaks down?
Where there is a
misunderstanding or you know,
just some rogue, bad
leader comes along.
Is that it?
Is war a malfunction
of society?
Is war when things go wrong?
Or is war when things
go right?
Is there something that
draws us to war?
Is there something that is
rewarding about war?
Now in American, what
should we say?
Political philosophy, political
mythology to say we
like to think that we are
a peace-loving people.
And I think at a fundamental
level we are.
I don't claim that Americans are
insincere in saying they
like peace, they prefer
peace to war.
But consider-- well in fact, I
found myself speaking to a
group in Fredericksburg,
Texas.
If you've ever been to
Fredericksburg, Texas you
might know that is has the best
museum in the country on
the war in the Pacific
in World War II.
In fact, it's called Museum
of the Pacific War.
It used to be called the Chester
Nimitz museum because
Chester Nimitz was from
Fredericksburg, Texas.
But is has expanded and now it's
this wonderful Museum of
the Pacific War.
And every year in September, for
the last 20 years, they've
been having a symposium on
World War II or more
repeatedly, on wars generally.
And they have really
good attendants.
All sorts of people come.
Now the core of the audience
attending consists of World
War II veterans.
And when they come it's
like a reunion of the
groups they got to know.
I was asking this group, this
very same question,
why is there war?
And I said, you all have your
reasons, but I'm going to
suggest something.
And you know, you feel free to
agree with this or disagree,
but I'm just going to
put it out there.
And that is I look at you.
Now if I might ask, are
there any World War
II vets in the audience?
OK.
So and you will have your
own opinion about this.
But I said the fact that you
come to Fredericksburg, Texas
and they come from all over the
country every September
tells me that there was
something very meaningful
about this experience to you.
And I've talked to veterans
of various wars.
And I've read about veterans
of various wars.
And I won't say without
exception, but in very many
cases they describe this, they
think of this as the most
important experience
of their lives.
It was in some ways the most
thrilling, it might have been
their most terrifying, the most
meaningful, whatever it was.
They still get together 60
years after the fact to
commemorate it.
What else do people do that has
that kind of influence on
their lives?
So there is certainly for war
veterans, there's that appeal,
there's that draw.
So anyway, I decided that for
this biography I wanted to
write about a soldier.
I wanted to write about someone
whose claim to fame
was primarily that he was
successful at war.
I hadn't written about
anybody like this.
I did write about Andrew Jackson
and Andrew Jackson's
military career was
relatively brief.
He didn't identify himself
as a soldier.
He was a planter, and then he
became a president, but he
wasn't-- that's not the reason
that we remember Jackson.
Yeah, he had this big victory
at New Orleans in January of
1815, but that was
a one-day battle.
You know, he didn't conduct a
long campaign and win in a
really big war.
I wrote about Theodore
Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt's a
fascinating case on this
subject because Theodore
Roosevelt is the only American
president who, as far as I know,
ever celebrated war.
Most American presidents have I
would say the good taste or
the good sense to say war might
be necessary at times,
but it's a necessary evil.
But Theodore Roosevelt, at
least before he became
president and before he went to
war said that the greatest
victories of war-- or he said
the greatest victories of
peace pale beside the
accomplishments of war is war
that tests the nation's courage
and all this stuff.
And Theodore Roosevelt was
somebody who really had to
test himself.
And Theodore Roosevelt, after
he became president of the
United States still preferred to
be called-- and of course,
as you probably know, once
you're president of the United
State you, in most cases, are
generally addressed as
President Carter, President
Clinton, as long as you live.
But Roosevelt much
preferred to be
called Colonel Roosevelt.
And he spoke about and some of
you may know, I don't know
what this literary allusion
is, I should know.
But he always referred
to his crowded hour.
And any of you know what that
allusion comes from?
Some work of literature.
Shakespeare.
Is it Shake-- Do you know
which one it is?
Henry V.
Very good.
Thank you.
Thank you, Gleaves.
See, Gleaves Whitney and the
Hauenstein Center are the
source of knowledge on all
things presidential.
I will refer you to Gleaves.
Yes.
The curious thing is Theodore
Roosevelt's crowded hour
lasted about an hour.
The center of his military
career was the charge up
Kettle Hill in San Juan
Heights in the Spanish
American War.
And the battle lasted
about an hour.
He did perform gallantly.
No question about that.
The casualty rate in his
unit was quite high.
He survived and he knew that he
had the coverage to do it.
And that was enough.
OK, done that.
Now let's go back and get
elected governor of New York.
OK, but I wanted to focus on
somebody who had been involved
in a serious way with
a really big war.
A war that brought out-- well,
the best and the worst I
guess, in American history.
And I also needed a character
who could carry the story
forward through reconstruction.
So I came upon Ulysses Grant.
And I decided to write
about Ulysses Grant.
And now I will share with you
a moment that was-- at the
time it wasn't particularly
amusing.
In retrospect, it sounds
a little bit amusing.
Lots of people have written
about Ulysses Grant.
So an obvious question for
a book review editor for
example, or a publisher is, so
Brands you got anything new on
Ulysses Grant?
Well, it so happened that I was
having dinner about three
months ago with Sam Tanenhaus.
Sam Tanenhaus is the
editor of the New
York Times Book Review.
And although it's not as fat
as it used to be, it still
remains probably the
most important book
review in the country.
And if you can get-- boy, if you
can get a favorable front
page review on the New York
Times Book Review then this is
a real good deal.
So I was sitting down next to
Sam Tanenhaus at dinner.
And he had come to Austin to
talk about something or other,
so we had dinner.
And a friend of mine, a mutual
friend, got us dinner.
And so part of the idea was I
was going to be able to talk
up my Ulysses Grant book.
As it so happened though, about
three days earlier I had
come down with a cold.
And I had a heavy teaching
schedule
during those three days.
So I had to lecture through this
cold that was coming on;
my throat was getting tighter.
But I was going OK.
And I had given my lecture that
ended 15 minutes before
we got together for dinner on
another part of the UT campus.
I got to dinner and my voice
utterly gave out.
I couldn't even croak
a syllable.
So here I am with a chance to
promote my book to the most
influential book review editor
in' the country and Tanenhaus
turns to me and he says,
so, hear you're
working on Ulysses Grant.
The book coming along
pretty well?
You got something new to say?
So what do you have to say?
What's new to say?
At that point I had realized
it wasn't a yes or no
question, I couldn't
answer him.
So I let him hanging.
But I'm not going to leave you
hanging because well in fact,
I was talking to my editor
a couple of days ago.
And I will tell you-- well,
I'll tell you the--
what shall I say?
That the politic description of
what's new, what the book
review editor needs to hear
and then I'll tell you the
real answer to the question,
what's new?
The strategic answer is well, in
the first place, I believe
that Grant's reputation as
president has been cast in
obscurity and criticism
for far too long.
Grant is generally perceived
by the public at large and
even by historians of the
presidency to be one of the
least effective presidents
in American history.
And to have had an
administration that was
peculiarly afflicted by
graft and corruption.
Now one of the things I'm going
to do is to explain how
the last hundred years of
scholarship and writing on
Ulysses Grant is quite wrong.
That Grant was a far better
president than he has been
given credit for being.
And this will be in part based
on re-interpretation of
existing evidence.
But also, access to
new information.
It is my good fortune to be the
first biographer to come
along since the completion
of a wonderful series of
published volumes of Grant's
correspondence and other writings.
This collection had been in the
works for 25 or 30 years.
And the later volumes deal
with his presidency.
The earlier volumes focused
on the war years.
And the later volumes include a
great deal of correspondence
that other biographers
have not used.
In particular, correspondence
from African Americans and
republicans in the South
during Reconstruction
explaining what conditions
on the ground are like.
Now I'm going to get into this
in greater detail, but
essentially what happens during
Reconstruction is that
the Union victory in the Civil
War, a military victory has to
be converted into well, into
something political.
Because at some point-- in this
case, in April 1865 at
Appomattox, the war ends
and politics resumes.
And it is my contention, and I
have been studying and writing
about American history for a
long time that there has been
no-- there's never a more
difficult period to be
president of the United States
than during Reconstruction.
It was a personal tragedy and a
familial tragedy for Abraham
Lincoln to die, to be killed in
April of 1865 right at the
end of the Civil War.
But from the standpoint of his
historical reputation, it was
a great career move.
Because the war was easy
compared to what
came after the war.
And the reason for this is
during war you get to use
instruments of coercion.
If people don't agree with you,
if South Carolina wants
to be independent and you don't
think South Caroline
should be independent, if South
Carolina refuses to
enforce federal laws, you
send in the Army.
And it's painful, it's bloody,
but it's simple.
It's straightforward.
And the conclusion on
the battlefield can
be quite clear cut.
We win, you lose.
But when the war ends, then
these questions shift from the
arena of the military to
the arena of politics.
And politics is a lot
more complicated.
It's a lot harder than war.
If Lincoln had lived into the
period of Reconstruction, I
firmly believe that his
reputation would have declined
dramatically.
Because once the South is
readmitted to the Union, and
it would be eventually.
Of course, Lincoln had taken
the position the south had
never left the Union.
But something weird had happened
and so the south had
to be reconstructed.
But everybody knew that the end
result would be that South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, all the states of
the Confederacy would eventually
regain control over
their own affairs.
The North, the Union
army would not
occupy the South forever.
In fact, turns out it wouldn't
occupy the South for more than
about half a decade.
The American North would
simply-- you know, we're not
going to occupy the South.
They wouldn't stand for it
and the South wouldn't
stand for it either.
And in a democracy, whether
you like what the people
choose or not, in a democracy if
they make a decision, if a
majority of people votes
this way, that's what
they're going to get.
Now it's made more complicated
by the fact that there is this
Constitution and our
Constitution is based on the
principle of the majority rule,
but minority rights.
That's why we have
a Bill of Rights.
That's why there are various
amendments that say what the
government can and cannot do.
So for example, the 13th
amendment says there will be
no slavery despite the fact
that slavery was a popular
institution in the South.
And in every southern state, it
was voted by a majority of
the people.
It happened to be a white
majority, but nonetheless.
If you would gone simply on
majority rule, slavery would
have continued.
That's why it had to
be ended with a
constitutional amendment.
The 14th amendment said that
rights cannot be-- I mean
basically says, who
can be a citizen.
But it also says that your
rights cannot be abridged
without due process
of the law.
It basically says what
you can't do.
And the 15th amendment says that
the right to vote cannot
be abridged on account of race,
color, or conditioner of
previous servitude.
And there again it's what
the states cannot do.
But it's one thing to pass a
law, even an amendment to the
Constitution.
It's another matter to
try to enforce that.
And what do you do?
What do you do in a democracy
when you have
an unpopular law?
Well I can tell you that the
14th and 15th amendments were
quite unpopular in the south.
And Grant found himself on the
receiving end of these pleas
from not just blacks
in South Carolina
and the rest of south.
But in many cases, white
republicans as well.
The republicans were branded--
I mean they're often called
black republicans even if
they weren't black.
But they were the ones, they
were considered to be the
party that had imposed northern
rule on the south.
And so in the period after the
Civil War, sometimes in the
most egregious form of the Ku
Klux Klan where there was
overt violence, threats,
intimidation, murder and all
this stuff against freed
men and republicans.
Sometimes it was slightly more
subtle than that, but there
was this full-- there was this
full scale agenda to drive
those folks out of politics so
that the old elites, the slave
owners, former slave owners and
their allies could regain
control of politics.
And the term that was used,
certainly by southerners and
it was adopted eventually even
by historians in the north.
The term for the recapture of
control of southern state
politics by the white locals
from the northern
reconstructionists, the
term was redemption.
And the individuals who did it
were called the redeemers.
Well if you start labeling
things that way, you can tell
which side you're on here.
Anyhow, Grant-- this is one of
the fundamental points I make
in the book-- Ulysses Grant was
the only president between
Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon
Johnson-- the only president
in that hundred year period
who took civil
rights, at all, seriously.
And otherwise, presidents simply
ignored civil rights.
Or in the case of Woodrow
Wilson, were kind of
retrograde on civil rights
and imposed segregation.
Wilson imposed segregation on
the federal work force.
So the thing that's going to
make my Grant book different
is, at least, in the answer to
Sam Tanenhaus-- I've been able
to give the answer-- was new
information and this
reassessment of Grant and his
role as an American president.
But that's not the real answer
to the question.
Is an answer that is going
to sound highly immodest.
But I'll tell you what it is.
The real answer is that I'm
going to write a better
biography of Grant than anybody
else has written.
And you laugh, but I
mean it seriously.
I don't mean it quite as
pretentiously as it sounds.
But think about it
for a minute.
If I didn't think I could do
it, why should I bother?
Because if people want to read
something about Grant, go read
about Grant.
I've read the biographies of
Grant and I think I can do a
better job.
So now, if you should choose
to-- I hope you do-- buy the
book, then you will get
to decide whether I
was right or not.
And book reviewers will get to
weigh in on this as well.
But there is, you call it a
healthy or an unhealthy
egotism on the part
of writers.
But you sort of have to have
this because there's almost
nothing interesting
that hasn't been
written about already.
And so, why do it again?
Actually, this question of
writing about it already comes
up with my graduate students.
Most of them are writing
dissertations.
And the model of a dissertation,
those of you who
have been in graduate school,
you know the model of the
dissertation is to write
thoroughly, comprehensively,
exhaustively on some aspect of
whatever your subject is that
hasn't been so thoroughly
covered before.
And one of the ways of finding
a legitimate topic is to find
a topic that no one
has written on.
And so my graduates were looking
around for something
that nobody has written on.
But I caution them
against this.
I say, no, you really don't
want to do that.
You don't want to write on
something that nobody has
written on because there's
probably a reason nobody has
written on that subject.
And I refer them to a
conversation that a friend of
mine had, a historian, a
military historian, who had
written first couple of books
on oh, rather esoteric
subjects having to do
with the Pacific War
during World War II.
And he wanted to write a
biography of-- a biography of
an important figure in
the Pacific War.
And he proposed various American
naval and army
officers who were engaged
in the Pacific field.
And he would put out one name
and the editor would say, I
don't think there's much
interest in that person.
Then put put another name.
Who knows about this person?
And this went on for three
or four more suggestions.
And finally, my friend said in
exasperated, well, I suppose I
could write another biography
of Douglas MacArthur, but
there are dozens of
biographies of Douglas MacArthur.
And the editor said, yeah.
That's because people are
interested in Douglas MacArthur.
So one of the things I
tell my students is
that not a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing.
It's not the end of the world.
If they're working on a
dissertation and they
discover, oh my gosh.
Somebody else it writing
on the same thing.
History is a different
kind of endeavor than
mathematics or physics.
If you were looking for-- I
can't remember what subatomic
particle is the one that
everybody's looking for right
now, but the first one to be
able to identify, the first
one to prove its existence, the
first one to demonstrate
this wins the prize, the
Nobel Prize probably.
And the second person to
identify it gets nothing.
In mathematics, until a few
years ago, the grand prize in
mathematics was to prove
Fermat's last theorem.
And it was this statement
given by Pierre
Fermat 400 years ago.
And mathematicians have been
trying forever and
ever to prove it.
And the deal was that if you
prove Fermat's last theorem,
then you would be the greatest
mathematician of your
generation if you were the
first. If you were the second,
eh, nothing.
But history isn't like that.
So if somebody is writing how
about-- well, Ulysses Grant.
If somebody's writing about
any other subject.
If somebody's writing about
whatever my students are
writing their dissertations
on and they discover that
somebody else is writing on the
same subject, well that's
all to the good because it shows
that they're not the
only one to think it's
interesting.
OK, so the real answer to the
question of why I'm taking
Ulysses Grant and what I'm going
to say is new is it's
this great story and
I want to tell it.
OK, now I'm going to tell
you a little bit about
Grant and his story.
And one of the things that
intrigues me about Grant and
this gets back to the question
of why is there war?
At least I think there's
a partial
answer to the question.
Grant is a classic case of
an individual who was
really good at war.
But at almost nothing else.
And if you look in history, you
see this again and again.
If you simply look at the Civil
War, Grant was good
friends with William Sherman.
The two of them were at West
Point for a while together and
then they went off and fought
in the war with
Mexico in the 1840s.
One of their comrades in the war
with Mexico was Robert E.
Lee.
He was older than they were, so
we wasn't at West Point at
the same time.
But they discovered that they
had this knack for war.
Now one of the knacks for
war-- and this, Grant
discovered it in his
first battle.
George Washington by the way,
discovered it in his first
battle that he found himself
under fire and he wasn't
afraid, he was thrilled.
And Washington writes home a
letter that I don't have it
word for word, but it's--
this is pretty close.
He said, I heard the bullets
whizzing around me and I can
tell you there is magic
in the sound.
Now if that's your response to
being under fire, you would
know you've got a
future in war.
It's interesting that Grant
writes almost the same thing
after his first engagement.
Now I have no reason to think
that he had read the
Washington letter.
Interestingly enough, Winston
Churchill came under fire in
the Boer War and had exactly
the same response.
So if you are person who find
yourself under fire and you
don't run away in fear, but
instead you respond with an
adrenaline rush and wow, this is
life as it's supposed to be
lived, then you have the
makings of a soldier.
Now of course, one of the things
that has to happen is
those bullets that are whizzing
around you have to miss.
In fact, Churchill put it with a
certain elegant and humorous
turn of phrase where he says
something to the effect about
the bullets whizzing around
you without affect.
But Grant discovers this
in the war with Mexico.
And he goes off and this despite
the fact-- this is
striking with Grant.
And one of the things that is so
charming and Grant is that
he is quite candid about his
evaluation of whether the wars
are just or necessary, or not.
Grant thought that the war with
Mexico was unjust. That
the United States had no
business invading Mexico and
seizing territory from Mexico.
But as a soldier that wasn't
his decision to make.
And as a soldier
he took orders.
And as a soldier he behaved
quite gallantly and he found
to be very fulfilling.
It helped matters and this
gets back to when I was
talking about my students and
the girls in the class and the
guys in the class.
He was engaged to be married
before he went off to war.
The father of his--
well, excuse me.
He was secretly engaged
to be married.
He and his wife to be, Julia
Dent, they had agreed that
they would get married, but she
wasn't going to tell her
father because her father didn't
think much of somebody
who was a soldier.
Her father wanted someone who
would be able to support her
in the style to which
she was accustomed.
Now I might add something here,
which is kind of ironic.
Julie Dent's family was
from the outskirts
of St. Louis, Missouri.
Missouri was a slave state.
Julia grew up having servants,
slaves, personal servants.
She kept those servants, those
slaves, after she married
Ulysses Grant.
She kept those servants
after-- even after
the Civil War began.
Ulysses Grant was heading the
Union Army that by this time
was fighting to free the slaves
and his wife still
owned slaves.
Now this strikes us as curious,
contradictory.
But one of the joys of doing
history is discovering how
messy the world really was.
This business of you could be
fighting to free the slaves
and your family still owned
slaves-- people didn't think
much of that at all.
You have this idea that the
north was free territory after
about the beginning of
the 19th century.
The slavery presented
in the south.
Did you ever think what
happened though when
southerners went on vacations
into the north?
And they traveled
to the north.
And if you were of a certain
class you would take your
servants with you.
Wealthy Northerners took their
servants with them.
Wealthy Southerners took
their servants.
And any given time in New York
City as late as the 1850s.
there were lots of
slaves around.
And you might have thought well,
maybe the slaves could
take advantage of being on free
soil and tear off and
claim their freedom.
But they couldn't.
You know why not?
Because there was a law against
it written into the
Constitution.
Each state is required to
assist in the return of
runaway slaves.
And the law was bolstered in
1850 with something called the
Fugitive Slave Act.
So there wasn't this clean
distinction between North and
South, free territory
and slave territory.
Oh.
You know about the underground
railroad?
The underground railroad,
where'd it go from?
From the South.
And where did it go to?
Went to Canada.
Why did it have to go all
the way to Canada?
Because an escaped slave wasn't
safe in Ohio, wasn't
safe in New York, wasn't
safe in Massachusetts.
They had to get clear out
of the country, beyond
extradition laws.
That's the only place
it could be saved.
So anyway, so Grant discovers
that he has
this knack for war.
And Julia, his beloved,
appreciates this.
He comes home after the war and
he looks so handsome in
that uniform that they
decide to break
the news to her father.
And even the father is
kind of impressed.
He's heard about how Ulysses
Grant has done i the war.
And OK, I guess you
can marry him.
So they get married.
He's sent off.
Now this is a problem for
American soldiers historically
up until the post World
War II period.
The United States did pride
itself on not having a
standing army.
That is, no peace time army.
The United States operated on
the Cincinnatus principle
where the country goes to war,
we gather our ordinary
citizens and they go fight.
We win the war, the war ends,
we send them home.
The Army disappears.
Americans liked this idea.
Why?
Well in the first place
it was cheaper.
You don't have to support an
army when you don't need it.
And secondly, it eliminates or
it largely mitigates the risk
of a military take over
of the government.
If there's no military, how are
you going to take over the
government?
And Americans who knew their
history, knew about-- well,
they knew about Rome and Caesar
marching on Rome and
doing all this stuff to take
over the civil government.
This is the principle reason
why the separation of the
civil government from the
military government and the
subordination of military
leaders to the elected
officials has become-- even
until now, it is part of the
American political gospel.
This is something that
we stick to.
By the way-- not today, in a
couple of days we're going to
hit the 50th anniversary.
No wait, 50?
60.
60th anniversary of the moment
in American history when this
was most sorely tested.
About who's going
to be in charge?
The generals or the elected
officials. you know what I'm
referring to?
Truman's firing of MacArthur.
And a great aspect
of this story.
Anyway, Grant comes home,
the war's over.
He's married, he and his wife
Julia start having children.
And then the Army has
to figure out
what to do with Grant.
The Army is reluctant to release
officers who were
trained at West Point.
The country has put in a lot of
resources, a lot of effort
to train these folks.
So what are they going
to do with them?
They're going to send them off
to the parts of the country
that need defending.
But defending from whom?
That's an open question.
Grant gets sent out to America's
newly acquired
territories in the west. He
goes off to the Oregon
territory, which is acquired
by purchase.
Well, purchase?
No.
It was acquired by agreement
with Britain.
There had been a big dispute
over who would control the
Oregon country and Grant goes
off to Oregon for a while.
And then he's sent to
Northern California.
California was added
by conquest in
the war with Mexico.
And he goes to an Army post
in Northern California.
I grew up in Western Oregon,
in Portland.
I know the West Coast, the rainy
West Coast. I know what
it's like to be on the Oregon
coast between about October
and May or so.
And I know that it's very
gloomy; it's often raining so
hard you can't get out
of your cabin.
In those days, cabins often
didn't have windows.
It was dark, it was
discouraging.
Grant was a long
way from home.
His wife was halfway
across the country.
He couldn't bring her out.
She had no place to stay.
It was not fit for a wife.
It wasn't fit for
little children.
On his pay he could hardly
support himself.
The gold discovery in California
had sent prices
skyrocketing in California.
And on his captain's pay,
he could hardly
keep himself in food.
He is beginning to have
second thoughts about
this military career.
Yeah, as long as there's
a war on that's fine.
But there's a long time
between wars.
What are you going to do then?
What did Grant do?
Well he did what other
soldiers did in
these far away posts.
He did what soldiers have
done forever and ever.
He drank.
And it turned out that Grant
couldn't hold his liquor.
Now you probably know that
in the British Empire for
example, the ability to hold
one's liquor was an aspect of
a gentleman.
And maybe it just enabled you
to continue to carry on when
you're in these hardship
posts and the only
thing to do is drink.
So Grant demonstrated that he
had a problem with booze on
the rainy, lonely California
coast in the early 1850s.
We don't know exactly what this
lead to in the near term.
We do know that Grant suddenly
resigned his
commission in the Army.
Now this was a decision
he had come to for
a variety of reasons.
As I say, he was trying to
figure out if he could support
his family on his Army pay.
He was trying to decide if he
could stand being away from
Julia and the children
that long.
He had at this point.
At least one child who was
almost two years old whom he
had never seen.
And so he was having serious
second thoughts about the
military as a career anyway.
And then he seems to have run
afoul of his post commander.
And the details are a little bit
fuzzy, but Grant all of a
sudden decides to resign
his commission.
And he doesn't give a reason,
he just resigns.
Grant's father gets
wind of this.
I haven't told you anything
about Grant's relationship
with his father.
But his father was something
of a task master.
His father was a successful
business man, a successful
entrepreneur.
Somebody who knew how
to get things done.
Who had a kind of practical
intelligence that seemed to
elude his son.
And Jesse Grant, the father,
was very disappointed in
Ulysses Grant.
He had had to bend, twist arms
and call in political favors
to get Grant the assignment
to West Point.
The appointment to West Point,
even then, it was
considered a big deal.
And Grant went off.
And he wasn't that crazy about
going himself in the first
place, but his dad got
him, so he did.
Well, Jesse Grant was very
disappointed to hear that
Ulysses Grant had resigned
from the Army.
He didn't know about
the drinking.
But when he heard that his son
had resigned he just thought
he was depressed and so he wrote
to the Secretary of War
trying to get the Secretary of
War to intervene and to stop
the resignation, to refuse
the resignation.
Interestingly enough, the
Secretary of War was a man
named Jefferson Davis.
And Jefferson Davis got this
letter from the father of this
officer he had never heard of
and said, the deal is done.
He's resigned.
He didn't offer any explanation,
but it's not
required of me to hear
any explanation.
His resignation has
been accepted.
That's that.
One imagines what would have
happened if he had know what
was going to happen.
Anyway, so Grant leaves the
Army under a cloud and the
cloud is one of the things about
the Army officers in the
faraway posts was they
were great gossips.
And so the word went around the
war department that the
reason Grant left was that he
was going to be kicked out for
drinking on duty, which that
parts a little bit unclear.
Maybe it's true,
maybe it's not.
It's very clear that the
drinking strongly influenced
Grant's decision to leave. But
there were other reasons for
leaving anyway.
But the result was Grant leaves
the Army and he thinks,
good, I'm out.
He has no idea that he will ever
go back into the Army.
He's thinking, OK, I did my
stint and now I'm going to go
off and do something else.
And he doesn't really care at
that point that his fellow
officers, the ones who stay in
and the folks who are in
positions of authority in
Washington have heard about
this guy Grant and
he's a drinker.
He goes off and he tries his
hand first at farming.
Turns out he's a lousy farmer.
He tries his hand at business.
He has no head for business.
He can't make people pay when
they owe him money; he's to
much of a soft heart.
He tries selling insurance;
he's not
a persuasive salesman.
He runs into William Sherman.
Sherman has had the same kind
of experience during the
1850s, during the period
between the wars.
And Sherman runs into Grant
and the two of them
commiserate saying, boy, that
West Point didn't prepare us
to be peace time soldiers.
Sherman has left the army and
he has had john as dismal an
experience as Grant has had.
And the two are thinking,
what's to
become of us soldiers?
Grant is was forced to what
for him is the humiliating
position of going to his father
who has been getting
more and more critical
of Grant.
Can't you do anything right?
He had to ask to borrow some
money from his father.
Father reluctantly loaned him
the money and he was planting
some crops and the frost came
and took away all the crops.
And he couldn't pay
his father back.
Now, at the age-- he's
almost 40 years old.
40 years old, he's supposed
to be a mature guy.
He's got a family and he has
to go plead with his
father for a job.
The father says, OK.
You can work in the family
leather business.
Now he has two younger
brothers.
Now this whole dynamic of
younger older brothers.
And the fact that the younger
brothers is succeeding, the
older brother is a failure.
This makes it even
more humiliating.
But Grant decides OK,
I'll work in the
leather store for a while.
Maybe something will
come of this.
But it's very clear that this
guy is on a path to nowhere.
The world will never hear
of Ulysses Grant.
And he is resigned to
a life in obscurity.
And I say if you read his
letters, he seems reasonably
resigned to it.
It's not as though there
is this burning
ambition inside him.
Or at least if there was, it's
well hidden, probably from
himself too.
I read the letters and at this
point in his letters, he never
expects to be famous.
He never expects that anyone
besides the direct addressee
will read these letters.
They're letters to his wife.
He writes on occasion a letter
when he has to to his father.
So it's not like he's creating
a historical trail.
He thinks that he's going to
live the rest of his life and
die in obscurity.
And, by all appearances,
he's OK with that.
Oh, and I should add that he had
just the mildest interest
in politics.
He's in Missouri and politics--
well, Missouri
until he goes to Galena,
Illinois.
He gets to Galena, Illinois and
this is where the family
has just opened up a
new leather store.
And he knows that there is
this controversy around
slavery, but he's
not involved.
He's not a political figure.
If anything, he leans democratic
rather than
republican.
The republican party is new
during the 1850s and Grant
thinks that the republicans
are a force of disruption
because the republicans insist
on containing slavery, or at
the extreme version,
abolishing slavery.
And Grant knows that the
abolitionists have injected
this volatile element
into politics.
And he doesn't think that this
is going to be good.
He looks at events in Kansas
where there is this small
scale, guerrilla style
civil war going on.
And he shakes his head and is
thinking if that's what the
republicans bring us, we don't
want any more of it.
OK, so he gets to Galena,
Illinois and he's settling
into a life as this obscure
clerk, maybe someday his
father will make him a
partner in the store.
But all of this is really at
his father's behest. And 40
year old son hasn't made
anything of himself.
And then the political world
spins a little bit faster.
Abraham Lincoln gets elected,
the South decides to secede.
And for the first time
in a decade, the
US Army needs officers.
And Grant remembers,
you, know, I was
kind of good at this.
And he does this point, get
drawn into the politics
surrounding the war
for the Union.
Illinois of course, is
Lincoln's home state.
And there are rallies
in the various
towns including Galena.
We will defend the Union because
Lincoln has now called
for volunteers, Appomattox
is [INAUDIBLE].
Fort Sumter has been fired on.
And Lincoln calls
for volunteers.
And Grant is trying to decide,
OK, well what shall I do?
I'm trained as an officer.
Most of the people who are
signing up to fight on behalf
of the Union have no
training at all.
The Army will be happy
to have me back.
So he writes a letter to the war
department saying, I would
like to reenlist. And I think
that I deserve a commission
as-- I can't remember
what he asked for.
I'm getting a lieutenant
or a colonel.
And because he looked around
him, he saw the people who had
a lot less training than he did
and a lot skimpier record
in the military were getting
higher offices than that.
Well, the Army quite clearly by
its foot dragging was not
enthusiastic at all about having
this drunk-- I mean,
this is the word on Ulysses
Grant back in the military.
And so they reject his initial
suggestion that he be
brought back in.
And then he writes again.
And this time his letter gets
lost. Well, so it seems.
Whether it really got lost and
just got shelved, he doesn't
hear anything.
So he begins to organize the
volunteers in Illinois.
Oh, and I might point out for
those of you who-- I'll remind
you of your Civil War history.
There was a strong belief on
both Northern and Southern
sides that this is going
to be a quick war.
The South believed that the
North wouldn't fight, the
North believed that the South
couldn't fight well.
And all it would take
would be one battle
and it would be over.
When Lincoln asked for the
75,000 volunteers right after
firing on Fort Sumter, he asked
for them to volunteer
for 90 days.
The assumption being the war
would be over in 90 days.
That's all it's going to take.
Well, the first big
battle of the war
occurs in July of 1861.
This is the first battle of
Bull Run or Manassas.
And it begins with-- in the
morning it looks like it's a
Union victory.
And reporters and various
observers of the battle, they
flee to the near and they run
to the nearest telegraph
office and then wire back saying
big Union victory.
But then the Confederates
counterattack.
And it turns out that it's
a Confederate victory.
Now, I had known that there was
this confusion about who
was going to win the battle.
And I thought well, OK.
I understand why if you're a
newspaper reporter you want to
get the scoop and you want to be
the first to report that it
was a a Union victory.
And how if you report on
first impression you
might get it wrong.
I didn't appreciate, I didn't
really understand what the
real motive behind trying to
be the first one there was.
Do you know what it was?
Well, the Civil War marked the
serious birth of speculation
on Wall Street.
Especially speculation in war
related stocks and even more
especially, speculation in
the American currency.
Early in the war, the Union
government was forced to for
the first time, issue
paper dollars
unbacked by gold or silver.
You know what the term
for these notes was?
Greenbacks.
That's why greenback is still
a nickname for the dollar.
And there was great speculation
in the greenback
because the greenback
essentially floated with
respect to gold.
And if you were a speculator and
you learned that the Union
was winning in a battle, well,
the dollar would appreciate
and you would make your
bets accordingly.
And so the first reports from
the battlefield were not of
reporters from newspapers, they
were of-- you could call
them spies or reporters--
were the speculators.
And it you got the news even
half an hour before somebody
else, you could make a
speculative killing.
Anyway, after the battle of Bull
Run it became apparent to
both sides that this
war was not going
to be a 90 day affair.
That the war was going to go
on for a while and the Army
decides, you know what?
We need all the help
we can get.
And so they decided that they
would bring Ulysses Grant back
into the US Army.
And Grant discovered that
he had a gift for
this military stuff.
When he was in the Civil War,
excuse me, when he's in the
war with Mexico he [INAUDIBLE]
senior officer, he simply
took orders.
He did discover that
he wasn't afraid.
He could get fired at
and he liked it.
This was important.
But he also discovered now, at
the beginning of the Civil War
that he had-- well I'm going to
go so far to say eventually
he discovered he had
a genius for war.
And genius here I don't mean
necessarily an IQ that's off
the chart, a particular
gift for the
tasks that war requires.
I'm running out of time.
And I do want to get some
questions from you.
But I will just tell you my
assessment of Grant as a
general and why he was able
to accomplish what he
accomplished.
And some of you might disagree
and then we can talk about it.
But anyway, Grant
had a knack for,
first of all, for logistics.
Of of the secrets of any
military success is getting
your resources, including your
troops where they need to be
when they need to be there.
And Grant was very good at this,
partly because during
the war with Mexico he
was assigned to the
quartermasters division.
He actually should have been
in the cavalry, he was a
brilliant horseman.
But his grades wee really low at
West Point and so he didn't
get his first choice.
They put them in the infantry.
And when he got in the infantry
they needed a
quartermaster, so they made
him a quartermaster.
So he was used to the idea of
how you supply the troops and
he knew perfectly well that--
you know, it was Napolean who
said, the army marches
on its stomach.
When troops are well fed,
they're happy and they're
prepared to fight.
If they're hungry,
they are not.
So he first of all, knew
how to do that.
And he knew it was essential.
It was not beneath any commander
to spend lots of the
time dealing with
those issues.
The second thing was that Grant
had and I don't know how
to quantify this, but he had
a kind of visual talent,
mentally visual talent for
visualizing the battlefield.
The biggest challenge for
commanders during the Civil
War was trying to figure out
where the enemy was at any
given time.
Not only where the enemy was,
where his own forces were.
Remember, this is in the day
before any kind of aerial
reconnaissance.
Well, there were in fact, the
beginnings of efforts to send
up observation balloons where
if you can get even-- you
remember the first time you ever
went up in an airplane.
How you looked down and all of a
sudden things become clearer
and you look at the city you've
been living in all this
time and oh, there it is.
Well, commanders did not have
that third dimensional
perspective.
And so you had to be
able to figure out.
You could look at maps, you
could look at the lay of the
land and you could try to see
where everything was.
Grant had an ability to
visualize the way the land
lay, where his own forces were,
and where the enemy
forces were, or where the enemy
forces must be if they
were going to oppose them.
And if they weren't where they
were supposed to be, where
they needed to be to oppose him,
then he get them where he
wanted unopposed.
So Grant had a knack for this.
There was something else.
And this came up.
William Sherman as I said was
one of Grant's friends.
William Sherman knew that he
was smarter than Grant.
He knew that he was better
versed than Grant in military
history and tactics and all this
stuff you could study.
But he also acknowledged that
Grant was a better general
than he was.
And he said, there's one thing
about Grant that he does
better than I do or
anybody else does.
And that is he knows what he
wants to do and he's able to
stick to that.
He's able to focus on that and
not be distracted by the other
stuff that happens
during a battle.
Now it's a truism of war that
the best laid plans blow up as
soon as the battle starts.
Well they did for other
generals, but for Grant he
knew what he wanted to do and
he would not be deterred.
He often almost ignored what the
enemy was doing because he
knew if he did this,
then he would
accomplish what he wanted.
And he was able to do it better
than anybody else on
the Union side.
And I would argue, better than
anybody on the Confederate
side either.
But there was a last element
to Grant's genius.
And this gets back to the
question of why is there war?
And I'll stop with this, then
I'll take some questions.
And it's a trait of Grant that I
don't know whether to admire
or to be appalled by.
And it comes down to this,
Grant figured out before
anybody else on the Union side
did-- for that matter,
probably anybody else on the
Confederate side did-- how the
Union would win the war.
He realized that the Union had
more resources than the
Confederacy did.
And the Union would win by
wearing down the South.
And what this required was the
willingness in a Union
commander to fight and
fight and fight.
And lose men and lose
men and lose men.
Grant had the ability-- and
again, I don't know if this is
something to admire or
to be appalled by.
He had the ability, the
willingness, to make a
military decision knowing that
he was-- that this decision
would lead to the deaths of
thousands of his men.
Nobody in American military
history until then had been
able or willing to do this.
Lincoln went through four
or five generals
before hitting on Grant.
And some of those generals--
George McClellan, Meade,
Booker, McDowell, they could
prepare for a battle.
McClellan was great at preparing
for a battle.
And his soldiers loved him.
But at the critical moment he
couldn't pull the trigger.
He couldn't make
that decision.
He couldn't bring himself to the
morally freighted decision
of saying, you will die
for this cause.
Now it's not you, you,
and you will die.
But of this group, a quarter of
you are going to be dead by
tomorrow morning.
It's something that had never
been asked of an American
commander before and Grant knew
that that was the way the
North would win the war.
Grant is often compared
unfavorably with Robert E.
Lee.
Robert E.
Lee is seen as the general who
was more brilliant, who was
more daring, who did this sort
of thing and that sort of
thing where Grant was
plotting along.
Well, in this respect, Lee
benefits from the fact that
first of all, he wasn't
expected to win.
He had to do this
kind of thing.
He had the luxury of
taking chances.
Grant didn't have that luxury.
Grant knew if you stick to
what you're doing, you're
going to win.
Now Grant as I said, even though
he was lukewarm about
politics before the war, even
though he didn't really care
much about the slavery issue,
by the middle of the war, by
the time he became the union
commander, he was fully
convinced that the Union
must be preserved.
And it was almost enough for him
to put it in those terms.
He had an interesting
view on secession.
He thought that the founding
fathers quite likely, would
have been on the side of the
secessionists in the 1860s.
That OK, he couldn't
say for sure.
But he didn't think that they
believed that this union was
forever and there was only
a one-way door in.
But he also said it's beside
the point what
the founders thought.
And in fact he said that even
if secession were not
admissible, what was going
on in the South with not
secession so much
as revolution.
And I might add that we've
kind of lost half of the
interpretation of what
the South did.
There were those in the South
who contended that secession
was perfectly legal and that's
all that was going on.
But there were others in the
South who said, you know, I
don't think secession
is legal.
What we're engage in here is not
secession, but revolution.
And even as staunch a unionist
as Andrew Jackson,
acknowledged the right
of revolution.
What's the right
of revolution?
The right of revolution is to
well, take the position that
Thomas Jefferson did in the
Declaration of Independence.
That if a government no longer
suits your needs and purposes,
you have the right
to overthrow it.
But here's the thing.
If you had the idea that
secession was legal and OK,
then you had to resent the fact
that the North resisted
secession by force because
they weren't
supposed to do that.
But if you planted your flag
on the right of revolution,
well, the right of revolution
includes the fact that the
revolution has to be fought.
And your right of revolution
will be upheld if you win.
If you lose, you lose.
And so Grant took that position,
this is a revolution
and we will fight to hold
the union together.
He also came around
to the belief that
emancipation was necessary.
Now, this is one of those cases
where I as the author or
anybody who's reading this or
anybody who thinks about what
you know about human
and motivation.
Is this a matter of Grant
carefully thinking this
through and saying, oh yeah,
after long thought, I've
decided that the Union must be
preserved at all cost and the
slaves must be freed.
Is that part of it?
That's probably part of it.
But a lot of it I'm sure is
as well, I have made these
horrible decisions, or at
least I have made these
decisions that have horrible
results for people.
How can I live with myself?
How can I justify these?
Well I can only do this by
asserting, by believing in a
higher good that's going
to come out of this.
In my book, I spend a lot of
time with Abraham Lincoln and
his relation with Grant.
And there's a wonderful
relationship that develops
between the two.
And there's a close parallelism
in their evolving
moral views.
So Lincoln is Grant's
commander.
Lincoln is the one who puts
Grant in charge, and who
basically signs off on all the
stuff that Grant is doing.
And Lincoln likewise, comes
around to this view that all
the costs of the war, as
horrible as they might be,
were necessary.
We had to do this.
We had to save the Union because
this is the last best
hope of mankind.
This is the test of whether
government of the people, by
the people, and for the people
shall or shall not
perish from the earth.
And that the slaves
must be freed.
This is a higher morality
that we are coming to.
Interestingly enough, Lincoln
didn't take that view before
the Civil War.
Didn't take that view really
until the summer of 1862 when
he writes the Emancipation
Proclamation.
So there's something
going on here.
And I think it's this kind of,
you do certain things and they
change the way you think.
And then you change the way you
think and you do certain
other things and it
feeds on itself.
Shall I conclude this, shall I
leave you with-- well, I will
just tell you that this view
of the Civil War-- now I'm
speaking in a firmly Union
state, Northern state, I'm not
going to be so bold as to say
you all agree with me.
If we were in Georgia I would
guess that a lot of you
wouldn't agree with me.
But what I'm about to say is
that this became kind of the
fundamental interpretation
of the Civil War.
The Civil War cost over 600,000
American lives.
And if you, in fact, I was just
reading The Smithsonian
magazine on the plane coming
up here today.
And there's an article by
a historian, a respected
historian on the Civil War who
contents that the Civil War
was necessary.
It was inevitable.
It had to happen.
Well, if you have been on the
side, well either side for
that matter, if you have been
engaged in an activity that
kills more than half a million
people you have this huge
incentive to say we
had to do it.
Because if you say somehow we
goofed, sorry, that's not
going to wash.
And so, you know, you can if
you're a historian-- and
historians have taken this view
for the longest time that
the Civil War was necessary.
I don't know if it was or not.
We can't roll back the tape on
that one and play it again.
But there's no question if you
look at somebody like Grant,
he becomes convinced that
it's necessary.
And it's almost necessary that
he become convinced of that to
justify the, shall I say,
joy he gets out of war?
Joy would be putting it a
little bit too strongly.
There's no question though that
the war years were the
best years of his life.
And he fell freer, he felt more
fulfilled, he felt this
is what I was created to do.
Now if I had more time I'd tell
you more about Grant's
presidency.
In certain respects
it was a let down.
He wasn't gifted as
a politician, he
was gifted as a soldier.
I'll just leave one last
observation, appropriate I
hope to the Hauenstein Center.
We Americans have this weakness
for victorious generals.
We make them president.
And there is no observable
connection between one's skill
as a general and one's
skill as a president.
Sometimes we get lucky.
Dwight Eisenhower was a very
successful general and a
pretty good president.
And Andrew Jackson was a
successful general and his
presidency was OK.
Well, we'll never know about
Zachary Taylor or William
Henry Harrison, they
died too soon.
Ulysses Grant was a very well
meaning president and he did,
I think, as well as anyone
could have done.
But even after my rehabilitation
of Grant, he's
not going to be in
the top five.
So don't hold your
breath on that.
OK, I will stop there.
And I'd be happy to
take questions.
I hope there are
some questions.
But thank you very much
for listening.
