U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition by Bruce Catton

Author:Bruce Catton [Catton, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography
ISBN: 9781504024228
Amazon: B07B6933RP
Barnesnoble: B07B6933RP
Goodreads: 27418269
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1954-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

The General in Politics

1. Roads Leading Down

It had been a dazzling rise. Ten years earlier he had been a discredited ex-captain of infantry, a man who could not make a go of it in the regular army at a time when the regulars were supposed to offer a final haven for the shiftless and the irresponsible. In civilian life he had been a misfit, living under a pattern of ill luck so consistent that somehow it seemed that he himself must be mostly responsible for it.

Now, in the spring of 1865, Ulysses S. Grant was at the peak. Every reality of the old days had been inverted. The military life which he had always disliked had turned out to be the calling made for him. The army which, in the person of a grumpy post commander, had considered him unfit was under his sole command; with it he had won the greatest war in his country’s history. Indecision had been replaced by sharp decisiveness, drifting by direct action, ineffectiveness by a smooth and effortless competence. If he wanted reward, his fellow countrymen were prepared to give him anything they could; if he wanted to continue in their service they were likely to put the heaviest of all responsibilities on his shoulders.

Even in America, where the rags-to-riches, log-cabin-to-the-White-House story was the cornerstone of national folklore, there had never been anything quite like this.

Yet in the very perfection of his triumph there existed the beginning of tragedy. The one job for which he was supremely fitted had been given to him and he had finished it. His overwhelming success meant that other jobs would be given to him, and they would be radically different. They would, in fact, demand qualities quite the opposite of the ones that had brought him to his present high place. At the crest, any road he took would lead downward.

He would walk that road with his country, because in good fortune and in bad, in his strengths and in his weaknesses, he was the perfect representative of the land that bore him. His story is a strange allegory of America itself, of the way failure follows success, of the incomprehensible manner in which the endowment that wins a noble victory is never the endowment that can use the victory after it has been won. There is a will-o’-the-wisp strain flickering through American history, an unending effort to lay hands on a great prize clearly seen, fairly won and then strangely elusive.

Surprisingly enough, the nation most resembled Grant in its underlying relationship to the military arts and war.

Like Grant, it did not care very much for soldiering, and in ordinary times it felt ill at ease about it. It contributed little to military theory, simply because it never put its best brains to work thinking about it. Weapons of course were pure gadgets, invented or elaborated with great ingenuity, but war was a very different question, apparently quite a dull one, and it got no particular attention. The country never went to war properly prepared for it.

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