I admit I only read the chapter ion Ulysses S. Grant in John Keegan’s The Mask of Command. For my study of Grant, it’s enough to know that the British military historian decides to include Grant in a very exclusive circle battlefield leaders. Along with two other commanders who won epic wars in the history of western civilization, Alexander the Great and the Duke of Wellington, Keegan also profiles one disastrously unsuccessful leader, Adolf Hitler.
From the standpoint of Grant, it’s significant also that he made it into a book about the best generals in history while other contenders from American history and especially the Civil War did not. While Americans certainly rank George Washington ahead of Grant as a leader, Keegan finds Grant to be America’s top general. Keegan doesn’t even bother with Confederate generals beloved of Civil War buffs and white Southerners alike, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
In his chapter “Grant and Unheroic Leadership,” Keegan starts by depositing the reader next to Grant right two hours after the beginning of the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862. Keegan explains how Grant snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, riding around the battlefield to gain intelligence and issue orders for commanders ready to retreat to instead stand firm and work to close gaps in the Union line. On the evening of the first day of battle, after Sherman tells Grant that “we’ve had the devil’s own day” and Grant replies “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though,” Keegan describes how this moment opened up a place in history for Grant: “And so he did. The greatest general of the American Civil War had begun his ascent from obscurity.”
Unlike Wellington, who fought and defeated Napoleon in “the old style,” Grant valued innovation on the battlefield, writing that “War is progressive.” Grant became the first general to understand the new citizen-soldier created by a democratic republic and he managed his commanders and troops accordingly, with respect and a light hand. Yet Grant was a fighter and he got superior performance out of his men through his own determination to do what was necessary to defeat the enemy by destroying not his cities, but his armies.
Grant also embraced new technology effectively, especially the telegraph, which allowed him to oversee and manage all theaters of the war and not be limited to one theater alone or even a particular battle or campaign, unlike Lee, whose myopic focus on his native Virginia helped lead to the Confederacy’s defeat first in the West and then on Lee’s own ground.
Keegan offers many other reasons why Grant is the only American general who deserves to be ranked with Alexander the Great and the Duke of Wellington, though Grant’s trademark modesty would have prevented him from making the same claim of himself. And it was this modesty that has come down in history as a key part of Grant’s democratic appeal, just it was the “familiar reverence” that Grant inspired in his soldiers that helped motivate them to keep fighting in the face of unprecedented casualties long enough to win a war whose outcome was never certain.
