U. S. Grant sprang from humble, commonplace origins on the Ohio frontier. Huge statues and monuments in eastern and midwestern cities and scattered national military parks in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Virginia, most famously memorialize him, but serious students of the man should visit the obscure Ohio hamlets where he was born, reared, and educated in modest circumstances. The intrepid tourist visiting Point Pleasant can view Grant's birthplace, a twenty-square-foot wood structure. After his death, the house went "on tour" throughout the country before returning to its original location. Grant's boyhood home in Georgetown is also preserved, as is his father's tannery, and the two schoolhouses he attended. Grant's memoirs highlight with pride his plain western "ordinariness," a trait that cemented a bond between himself and so many soldiers and citizens during his long public life. Countless contemporaries noted this characteristic of ordinariness, expressing it differently. A Herman Melville poem described Grant as "a quiet Man, and plain in garb," while Walt Whitman's Grant was "nothing heroic ... and yet the greatest hero," and Mark Twain summed him up as "the simple soldier." For Union officer Theodore Lyman, the essential Grant "is the concentration of all that is American."
The above descriptions flattered the Union hero, but they also contained a hard kernel of truth. Here, reality mirrored well-publicized myths spread by the earliest biographies but also vetted by later scholars. Grant's family story echoed the experiences of a majority of his countrymen and -- women who, like himself, grew up in rural small towns or on farms in the early national period of the nineteenth century. His experiences soon diverged from that majority when he le the Buckeye State and entered the United States Military Academy in New York in 1839. From that time, Grant gained an elite national perspective framed by his military education at West Point and his coming of age as a soldier in the Mexican War. Along the way, the shy youth from Ohio acquired strengths and developed talents that overcame his weaknesses of character and life challenges, setting the stage for his accomplishments. Grant's early failures perplexed many, and some prefer to ignore or disparage his first forty years, adding mystery to his myth. T. Harry Williams began an essay, "Grant's life is, in some ways, the most remarkable one in American history. ere is no other like it." Williams added next, "His career, before the war is a complete failure." Always, Grant retained his commonplace demeanor, puzzling even his closest friends who sought to understand his particular great genius. His great friend and comrade William T. Sherman said, "Grant's whole character was a mystery, even to himself." Historian Bruce Catton remarked, "He looked so much like a completely ordinary man, and what he did was so definitely out of the ordinary, that it seemed that as if he must have profound depths that were never visible from the surface." Is Grant really so much of a mystery? Surely, a glimmer of the "depths" of Grant's personality can be discerned through an examination of his youthful influences and, just as surely, provide the key to his later fame.
Origins
Grant stated, "My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral." Matthew Grant, his earliest ancestor, came to Massachusetts in 1630; direct descendants went to Connecticut, then to Pennsylvania, and his immediate forebears ended up in the Western Reserve. The ability and desire to pack up and move somewhere else when failure struck or ambition beckoned was part and parcel of what ordinary white Americans considered their right. So too was the expectation and hope that one of those moves would result in an improvement from their previous lives. Many failed; but many succeeded. Character traits such as self-reliance, self-control, and thriftiness became associated with doing well in the country's burgeoning commercial economy. It was a time that afforded opportunities for poor, propertyless men to improve their condition. Jesse Root Grant was a shining example of such men..
In the year of his son's birth, 1822, Jesse was already known as an ambitious and hard-working young man on the rough-hewn Ohio frontier. His own father, Noah, a captain in the Revolutionary War, was neither ambitious nor hard working. Instead he had a reputation for drifting and drinking. Noah le Connecticut, tried his luck in Pennsylvania, and ended up in 1799 living in Deer field, Ohio, with his second wife, Rachel, and their seven children. Rachel's sudden death in 1805 broke up the family and eleven-year-old Jesse was alone in the world. Local families hired him to do chores and provided him with room and board. Then, Judge George Tod of the Ohio Supreme Court and his wife took pity on the loquacious teenager and included him in their family circle. From the Tods, a grateful Jesse received security, warmth, and encouragement for his future. By sixteen, Jesse had determined that the fastest route to independence was to master a trade. He chose wisely. He would be a tanner, someone who made leather from rawhides. A good living could be gained selling leather, providing a growing population with shoes and saddles and other desirable products.
More serious than the divide between the Stalwarts and Half-breeds was the emergence of a disaffected wing within the Republican Party contesting Grant's nomination in 1872. Sumner and Schurz led the Liberal Republicans, who demanded tariff and civil service reform (ending the spoils system and installing a merit-based system for most government positions based on competitive examinations), and a "New Departure" in Reconstruction policy. Grant stole some of their thunder when he approved civil service reforms, sought tariff reductions, and supported the sound-money platform. Liberal Republicans scoffed at his gestures and broke decisively with the president. In a letter to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, nominated to replace Colfax as vice president, Grant expressed his utter contempt for Liberal Republicans, particularly Sumner: "they have all attacked me without mercy.... Mr. Sumner has been unreasonable, cowardly, slanderous, unblushing false.... I feel a greater contempt for him than for any other man in the Senate."
Unable to win regular Republicans over to their side, the Liberals formed an independent movement attracting the disaffected from both major parties. Appealing to Democrats, reformers declared themselves in favor of white southern "home rule" with a restoration of all citizenship rights to ex-Confederates, in essence calling for an end to "bayonet rule." Fiery orator Anna E. Dickinson broke with the Republicans when she called for the defeat of a president who had a "greater fondness for the smoke of a cigar and the aroma of a wine glass" than for running the country. Articulating the platform of the Liberals, Dickinson demanded the end of "special legislation" for blacks and asked for "the democratic process to work its magic in the South." In return for this "New Departure," southern Democrats, local power, would pledge to uphold freed people's rights. The Liberal Republicans nominated New York Tribune owner and editor Horace Greeley as their candidate. Selection of the eccentric Greeley, ill and grieving from the sudden death of his wife, spelled certain defeat, even with the endorsement of the Democratic convention. "Sheer insanity," snorted a prominent editor. Grant had an equally trenchant comment about Greeley: "He is a genius without common sense."
Thus, Deeds's ordinary American goodness eventually triumphs over corruption and the greed of selfish fat cats. Early in the lm, Capra and screen-writer Robert Riskin established Deeds's genuine, humble patriotism -- and by association, that of the average person -- when Longfellow, asked which, among all of the amazing sights in New York City, he would like to visit the most, answers, "Grant's Tomb."
On a beautiful moonlit night, Deeds and his accomplice, a sophisticated, cynical newspaper reporter, Louise "Babe" Bennett, played by Jean Arthur, jump into a taxi, asking the driver to take them to "the tomb." Unlike today, cabbies needed no address, maps, or lengthy explanations. Walking up to the monument, the reporter takes Deeds's awestruck silence for disappointment. Babe tells him not to worry about it, because most people feel that way. Deeds expresses surprise and says that he guesses it depends on how you see it. "What do you see?" Babe asks. Longfellow responds, while looking at the tomb: "I see a small Ohio farm boy becoming a great soldier. I see thousands of marching men. I see General Lee with a broken heart, surrendering, and I can see the beginning of a new nation, like Abraham Lincoln said. And I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as President. Things like that can only happen in a country like America." e dialogue suggested both the lingering impression of Grant, and, in Bennett's sarcastic remarks, his legacy's descent. Alongside the tomb's reputation as an eyesore, rather than a meaningful memorial, on Manhattan's landscape, Grant's legacy seemed like a blot on American historical memory.
Grant's legacy rose and fell, and rose again in the succeeding years, never again approaching its previous heights. is was partly because of the Lost Cause's powerful sway and partly because the military hero and what he stood for -- the Union Cause -- has gone out of fashion, or is irrelevant to most Americans. As should be clear, Ulysses S. Grant never will be entirely erased from historical memory or academic examination. He's just too important for that to happen. Whenever there is an anniversary or a resurgence of interest in the Civil War for whatever reason Grant's life and career are revisited, as they were during World War II, the Civil War Centennial, and the civil rights movement, or when Ken Burns's Civil War series was shown on public television in the early 1990s. Recently, Grant's reputation has entered another upswing, with three major biographies (as well as numerous smaller studies), publication of the final volumes of the Papers of U. S. Grant, novels, and a superb PBS documentary (2002) in the American Experience series. The renovation of Grant's Tomb in 1997 once again made it an attractive, safe place to visit, featuring interesting historical exhibits and an annual program marking his birthday.
Part of Grant's modern resurgence may be attributable to the obliteration of Lost Cause tendencies in academic monographs and textbooks, beginning in the late 1960s and reaching a crescendo in the 1990s. His reputation in popular culture, however, remains mired in the "drunken butcher" and "worst president" mode. The looming Civil War Sesquicentennial (2011 - 15) may, for the new century, recast (once again) interpretations of the war, and of its major figures. Perhaps now is the time for a new kind of tourist to the tomb (as well as other Grant sites), one more appreciative and knowledgeable. Never again will most citizens feel an uncomplicated pride in Grant's achievements, or in what America has become since Appomattox, but there should be a realization that Grant's goal of national reconciliation -- as general and as president -- included principles that are vitally important today: justice and equality for all. Ulysses S. Grant became the embodiment of the American nation in the decades after the Civil War. No living person in the postwar era symbolized both the hopes and the lost dreams of the war more fully than Grant. No living person in the postwar era more clearly articulated for posterity a powerful truth about the Civil War when he wrote, in his Personal Memoirs (2:489), of his feelings about Lee and the soldiers he had led and the slave republic they had defended. U. S. Grant recalled, "I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." By studying his life with a fresh perspective, visitors to Grant's Tomb may be able to see all the tangled, complicated, but ultimately inspiring dimensions of a man who truly is both an American hero and an American myth, and they just may be able to answer the question, "Who's [really] buried in Grant's Tomb?"