GRANT AS A SOLDIER*
When General Grant came before the public, and into a position that compelled notice, he was called to meet a difficulty that his predecessor in the office of President had encountered and overcome successfully.
An opinion existed in the cultivated classes, an opinion that was especially local in the East, that a great place could not be filled wisely and honorably, unless the occupant had had the benefit of a university training.
Of such training Mr. Lincoln was destitute, utterly, and the training which General Grant had received at West Point, where it was his fortune to attain only to advanced standing in the lower half of his class, was at the best the training thought to be necessary for the vocation of a soldier. That minority of critics overlooked the fact that the world had set the seal of its favorable judgment upon Cromwell, Washington, Franklin, Napoleon, Hamilton and others who had not the advantages of university training. Napoleon in a military school and Hamilton in Columbia College for the term of a year, more or less, did not rank among university men.
That minority of critics did not realize the fact that colleges and universities cannot make great men. Great men are independent of colleges and universities. In truth, a really great man is supreme over college and universities.
Lincoln was such a man in speech, in power of argument, in practical wisdom, by which he was enabled to act fearlessly and with success in the great affairs of administration.
Such a man was General Grant on the military side of his career. With great military capacity, he was destitute of the military spirit. During the period of his retirement from the army after the close of the Mexican War he gave no attention to military affairs. When he came to Washington in 1865 as General of the Army, he was not the owner of a work on war nor on the military art or science.
His military capacity was an endowment. It might have been impaired or crippled by the training of a university; but it is doubtful whether it could have been improved thereby, and it is certain that it was, in its quality, quite outside of the possibilities of university training.
As General Grant approached the end of his career the voice of the critics, who judged men by the testimony of college catalogues and the decorations of learned societies, was heard less frequently; and his death, followed by the publication of his memoirs, written when the hand of death was upon him, silenced the literary critics at once and forever.
Since the month of July, 1885, there has appeared on the other side of the Atlantic a set of military critics, of whom General Wolseley, Commander of the British Army, must be treated as the chief, who deny to General Grant the possession of superior military qualities, and who assert that General Lee was his superior in the contest which they carried on from February, 1864, to April, 1865. On this side of the Atlantic there is toleration, if not active and open support of General Wolseley's opinion.
General Wolseley is entitled to an opinion and to the expression of his opinion; but his authority cannot be admitted. On the practical side of military affairs his experience is a limited experience only.
It is not known that General Wolseley ever, in any capacity, engaged in any battle that can be named in comparison with the battles of the Wilderness, with Spottsylvania, with Cold Harbor, or the battle of Five Forks; and it is certain that it was never his fortune to put one hundred thousand men, or even fifty thousand men, into the wage of battle and thus assume the responsibility of the contest.
It was never the necessity of the situation that General Lee should assume the offensive, and in the two instances where he did assume the offensive his campaigns were failures; and can any one doubt that if General Grant had been in command either at Antietam or Gettysburg, the war would than have come to an end of the left bank of the Potomac River by the capture of Lee's army? If this be so, then Lee's undertaking was a hazard for which there could have been no justifying reason, and his escape from destruction was due to the inadequacy of the men in command of the Northern armies. Following this remark I ought to say that General Meade was a brave and patriotic officer, but he lacked the qualities which enable a man to act promptly and wisely in great exigencies. While General Lee was acting on the defensive did he engage in and successfully execute any strategic movement that can be compared with Grant's campaign of May, 1863, through Mississippi and to the rear of Vicksburg? Or can General Wolseley cite an instance of individual genius and power more conspicuous than the relief of our besieged army at Chattanooga, the capture of six thousand prisoners, forty pieces of artillery, seven thousand stands of small arms and large quantities of other material of war?
During the period of reconstruction Alexander H. Stephens was examined by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives as to the condition and purposes of the South. When the examination was over I asked him when he came to the conclusion that the South was to be defeated. He said: "In the year 1862." I then said: "In that year you had your successes. What were the grounds of your conclusions?" In reply he said: "It was then that I first realized that the North was putting its whole force into the contest, and I knew that in such a contest we were to be destroyed."
If I were to imagine a reason, or to suggest an excuse for General Lee's two unsuccessful aggressive campaigns, I should assume that, simultaneously with Mr. Stephens, he had reached the conclusion that time was on the side of the North, and that the Fabian policy must fail in the end.
In an aggressive movement there was one chance of success. A victory and capture of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington might lead to an arrangement by which the Confederacy would be recognized, or a restoration of the Union secured upon a basis acceptable to the South. A desperate undertaking, no doubt, but it is difficult to suggest a more adequate reason for the conduct of General Lee.
I cannot, as a civilian, assume to give a judgment which shall be accepted by any one, upon the relative standing of military men; but I cannot accept, without question, the decision of a military man who never won a great victory in a great battle, upon a chieftain who fought many great battles and never lost one.
I end my observations upon General Grant as a soldier by the relation of an incident in my acquaintance with General Sherman, which was intimate during the four years that I was at the head of the Treasury Department.
It was my custom in those years to spend evenings at General Sherman's, where we indulged ourselves in conversation and in the enjoyment of the game of billiards. Our conversations were chiefly upon the war. In those conversations General Grant's name and doings were the topics often. General Sherman never instituted a comparison between General Grant and any one else, nor did he ever express an opinion of General Grant as a military leader; but his conversation always assumed that General Grant was superior to every other officer, himself, General Sherman, included.
In concurrence with the opinion of General Sherman the friends of General Grant may call an array of witnesses who, both from numbers and character, are entitled to large confidence.
During the four years of the Civil War more than two million men served in the Northern Army. Many of them, more than a majority of them, probably, served for at least three years each. With an unanimity that was never disturbed by an audible voice of dissent, the two million veterans gave to General Grant supremacy over all the other officers under whom they had served. With like unanimity the chief officers of the army assigned the first place to General Grant, and never in any other war of modern times has there been equal opportunity for the applications of a satisfactory test to leaders. In all the wars which England has been engaged since the fall of Napoleon, except, possibly, the Crimean War, the opposing forces have been composed of inferior races of men. The fields of contest have been in India, Egypt and South Africa. From such contests no satisfactory opinion can be formed as to the qualities of the leaders of the victorious forces.
In our Civil War the men and the officers were of the same race in the main, and the educated officers had been alike trained at West Point. Except in numbers, the armies of the North and the South were upon an equality, and in all the great contests, the numbers engaged were equal substantially. The quality of the man and officers may be gauged and measured with accuracy from the fact that at Shiloh, in the Wilderness and at Gettysburg the same fields were contested for two and three continuous days. It has been said of Mr. Adams that when an English sympathizer with the South lauded the bravery of the Southern Army, Mr. Adams replied: "Yes, they are brave men; they are my country- men."
The Southern Army was composed of brave men and its officers were qualified by training and experience to command any army and to contest for supremacy on any field.
My readers should not assume that I have avoided a discussion of the characteristics of General Grant in his personality and as a civil magistrate.
The voice of those who in 1872 denied his ability and questioned his integrity is no longer heard; but there are those at home and abroad who either teach or accept the notion that General Grant has become great historically by having been the favorite of fortune.
[* From the New York Independent.]