A lesson learned from SOLIDER OF DESTINY: SLAVERY, SECESSION, AND THE REDEMPTION OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, by John Reeves

 Your personal demons and disappointments do not need to define you.

Many stories have been told of how important the process of going through failure can be for learning lessons and setting people on a more successful life path. I thought about my own story as I read John Reeves’ latest biography of Ulysses Grant Soldier of Destiny, which focuses on the years from Grant’s embarrassing tenure as a California soldier in the 1850’s, to his ultimate triumphs in the American Civil War. For seven years, my goal in life was to become a full-time History instructor at the community college level, and I kept telling myself that if I stuck to it and kept working hard, I would eventually achieve my dream (all evidence that those jobs are virtually impossible for Social Science instructors to find at community colleges notwithstanding). One day, I was called into an interview for a school I had long worked at, and I drove away from it convinced I had gotten the job and had to start planning out my life accordingly. That night, the E-MAIL I received (no personal call) that I had been turned down was absolutely devastating and completely broke my dream, but it also eventually gave me a new sense of focus. I decided that life changes were needed, and it was time to take the risk I had long been terrified of, of seeing if I could teach History to unruly teenagers. A full decade after that fateful day, I think I’ve done OK for myself, and I am where I truly belong in the high school classroom.

I tell that long introduction because few men in history were as broken down as Ulysses Grant was at the end of the 1850’s. He clearly was a raging alcoholic, and had drank his way out of the U.S. army that had long been his career. This was an era when medical and psychological understandings of alcoholism were still in a primitive state, and anyone who struggled with the condition was seen as a moral failure who simply could not handle themselves. Grant married into slave-owning wealth, and by all accounts stayed around his wife as much as he could partly because she helped him to stay sober (although he was genuinely devoted to her). He himself had no enthusiasm for slavery (and emancipated the only enslaved man in his name relatively early on), but he also refused to lift a finger against it and personally benefited from his wife’s slave-based wealth. This seemed destined to be Grant’s fate–a modest slave-owner with a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, who would quickly fade into obscurity.

Of course, destiny intervened with the outbreak of the Civil War, and Grant immediately volunteered for a suddenly-desperate Union army (against the wishes of his wife and in-laws). One of the most notable qualities of Civil War leadership was an ability to absorb failure, learn from its lessons, and bounce back from it; Lincoln, Grant, and William Sherman had all known crushing disappointments in their lives and had attempted to benefit from their lessons (by contrast, pampered aristocrats such as George McClellan often proved totally incapable of handling the war’s setbacks). Grant himself continued throughout the war to struggle with avoiding alcohol in a hard-drinking army, and he had occasional embarrassing lapses (although never in the heat of battle when it really mattered). Grant’s own failures undoubtedly helped to give him sympathy for the underdog, which contributed to his growing conversion to racial equality and his open embrace of allowing black soldiers to aid in crushing the Confederacy. Grant made some poor decisions over the course of the war (in particular in never considering his enemy’s tactics) that got many of his men killed, but his willingness to admit those mistakes and attempt to learn from them ultimately made him the Union’s greatest general.

Reeves’ book is a great study of Grant’s alcoholism and his changing attitudes toward race, and perhaps my biggest criticism of it is that it’s too short (it suddenly ends just as Grant begins his famous military campaigns against Robert E. Lee). Grant was a deeply flawed man (his anti-Semitism left something to be desired in terms of his attempts to evolve), and later on became a deeply flawed-if-admirable president, an era that Reeves ends up not deciding to get into. But Grant is a figure who is a ripe study for those looking to learn lessons from history–a man who realized that you could struggle with personal demons, and repeatedly face failure, and still come out on the other side of it as a victorious leader and a better human being overall. We should all keep that in mind as we continue to try to overcome our own foibles and life disappointments.