Grant’s Cottage Revisited
Reviewing Elizabeth D. Samet's The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
We can never “know” history. Even that which we experience personally is seen through the filters of our upbringing, our teachings, and our self-derived points of view. Perhaps this is why so many secretly envy the classical educations of the past, wherein students were buried in the actual words of those who lived, or lived close by, the various stories of mankind. Certainly, this training in Western culture is rife with its own prejudices; we can only fantasize about the losses of more worldly knowledge and views that vaporized in the library of Alexandria. Almost all we learn now is derived, not original; we depend on the viewpoints and editorializing of historians and what were formerly called journalists for some comprehension of past and present events. Social media has “dissocialized” our personal experiences.
Opportunity to learn about history more directly remains always available, awaiting personal effort. Sometimes that effort is incidental to other intentions. Recently our extended family toured New York state’s Hudson Valley, with intent on experiencing historical sites with our grandchildren. Our yearly trips tend to concentrate on battlegrounds of both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and on Presidential homesteads both before and after office. Out of many such sites one stood out; Grant’s Cottage in the Adirondacks near Saratoga. Usage given to his family by an admirer, Grant expended the last year of his life in great pain and gradual starvation writing his memoirs. He did this at the urging of his friend Samuel Clemens to rescue the Grant family from complete poverty resulting from his involvement with a Bernie Madoff-style fraudster of the day. He had not wanted to write his life down prior to this but was compelled by circumstances beyond his control to make a maximum effort to save that which he loved. Much as he had done, somewhat reluctantly, when called to duty as the ultimate military leader of the Union and again as President of an unreconstructed nation.
Mount MacGregor, the cottage, is in fact a well-preserved modest home overlooking the valley of Saratoga. Two stories with several public rooms downstairs and bedrooms upstairs, it remains today exactly as it was at the moment of Grant’s death in the downstairs bed just inside the wide veranda where he often sat writing and visiting. That room’s clock still shows the time of his death, its hands stopped by Grant’s son Fred. The room is a sort of modern “great room”; beyond the area where he rested, slept, and died, is another area filled with three large funereal arrangements in exactly the positions placed after his passing. These are even more extraordinary in that they are covered in flowers called “immortals” for their reputation of persistence. Although browned and shriveled over the one and a third century since their arrival they are all still in place. Perhaps a reminder of Grant’s irreplaceable position in our national experiment. In one of the smaller entry rooms of the first floor is a glass cabinet containing many of the devices used to support and treat the pain and bleeding of his throat cancer. On top of this cabinet resides a large glass jar still containing the cocaine water he frequently swabbed in his throat to reduce pain and bleeding. A uniform stands in a corner cabinet. All this entirely preserved by the continued daily presence of three generations of caretakers who have lived upstairs in Grant’s last home with and since his family’s occupancy. Preservation of real history requires the guardianship of thorough attention to every detail.
As an earnest bibliophile who regrets the time no longer available to indulge in a classical education, I could not pass up the opportunity to purchase and read Grant’s final work. At the visitor’s center appended to the site I found something even better—The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant edited by Elizabeth D. Samet, a professor of English at the United States Military Academy (West Point) and the epitome of unbiased historical scholarship. Herein Grant’s writings, initially presold by Clemens in two volumes, are almost doubled in size as one volume with Samet’s cogent explanations and call-ups of prior military history as well as extended quotations of Grant’s contemporaries and commentators of the day. She blends his discussions of his wartime and post war successes and disappointments into the broader history of our national sabotage of Reconstruction and reconciliation. Her research extends this through our Supreme Court’s codification of Jim Crow into Woodrow Wilson’s and D.W. Griffith’s celebrations of racism that continued to infect our less than perfect union into our modern times. In all her annotations she mirrors Grant’s lifelong mimicry of his mentor, General Zachary Taylor, who “wrote so plainly that there was no mistaking his intention”(paraphrased). Yet the crown jewels of her volume are twofold; Grant’s chapter “Conclusions” and her “Editor’s Afterword: A Closer Look at Grant’s Tomb”.
While Grant had viewed the Mexican War, his first military experience, and the accession of Texas as the direct antecedents of the Civil War, he knew that “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United State will have to be attributed to slavery.” This written at a time when his contemporaries and government had already embraced the romantic fantasy of The Lost Cause and State’s Rights (note states have no rights under the Constitution, only powers delegated by the people). Yet although he writes of a lifelong disapproval of slavery, he as President favored statehood for Santo Domingo, whereto he supposed most “freedmen” would migrate to partake of their Constitutional equal rights in a separate location and culture, perhaps foreshadowing Plessy v Ferguson. This was little different from Lincoln’s ideas that resulted in the establishment of Liberia in Africa as a potential destination for freed slaves, but completely different from General Sherman’s grant of “40 acres and a mule” revoked immediately by Washington, D.C.. Grant felt that the North “…had no particular quarrel with slavery… until the Fugitive Slave Act forced them…to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution.”
Grant predicts the effects of advancing technology upon the social and political fabric of a nation barely one century old at the time of his writing. “In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats—in a word, rapid transit of any sort—the States were each almost a separate nationality…But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause…” of extinguishing slavery. How prescient to describe the process that over time may, of necessity, be eviscerating federalism in our system of government. He wrote many European powers viewed our Republic as a “rope of sand”, but that rope had been forged in the War of Rebellion into something capable of handling any stressors. Would he hold that view today?
He noted that maintaining peace would require preparations for war. He recommended a strong navy and sea-coast defenses of the best condition. In this he was promulgating a defensive role for the United States, not an interventionalist one. But Theodore Roosevelt realized the first part of Grant’s recommendations precisely for projection of our power beyond our shores, and thus began our modern age of American imperialism. In modern times, while we continue our endless wars expending all current and future wealth and much of our best blood (paraphrasing Lincoln’s second inaugural), perhaps only the Chinese Communist Party has heeded Grant’s admonitions. They are building and deploying a grand Navy and with their expansion of military bases throughout the South China Sea on both manmade and natural islands may become an impregnable nation that sequesters and saves its wealth and blood for future generations. Grant’s other observations regarding concurrent history in Europe are also eerily predictive of future and ongoing events. So one might observe that Grant’s detailed, direct, and explanatory writing of his story from the 1820’s until the week before his death in July 1885 provides that greatest gift of any commentary, continued utility into present times.
Elizabeth D. Samet details U.S. Grant’s continued utility in her “Editor’s Afterword: A Closer Look at Grant’s Tomb”. Herein she explains the rise, fall, and again risen reputation of Grant’s actions and thoughts in their effects on the broader history of our nation well into the century after his death. Part of the fall, beyond corruption amongst his Presidential subordinates, was caused by what Frederick Douglass in 1875 called “peace among the whites”, which may well have extended into our current times as a subconscious ignorance of subliminal racism. Perhaps this roller coaster is best explained by Samet’s quotation of Union officer Grenville Dodge, who in an exchange with Grant’s much more militarily successful Union General Sherman said “…the tendency all the time is, to wipe out history, to forget it, forgive, excuse, and soften….”. Grant’s very nature made his effects all the more malleable. Samet quotes Walt Whitman’s 1879 assessment of Grant in Specimen Days: “(Grant) proves how an average (man) carried by tides of circumstance, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military or civic responsibilities…may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all, …and then retiring quietly…”. Whitman wrote that what people saw in U. S. Grant was “A mere plain man—no art, no poetry—only practical sense, ability to do, or try his best to do, what devolv’d upon him. …nothing heroic, …and yet the greatest hero.” (The same might be said for our other great average man President, Harry Truman.) In Elizabeth D. Samet’s work the annotations, quotations, illustrations, and extensive bibliography serve to carve Grant’s memoirs and life into a tomb of living stone, immutable, always available to those who make the effort to read about his times, his character, and his story. While visiting Mount MacGregor evokes Grant, reading Samet’s version of his memoirs resuscitates his life, reputation, and some part of our better angels.