As I got back up to speed on Civil War history, he became for me even less than a mythical hero and actually less imaginable as a person. By the time I moved to New York as a grown-up and lived across the street from his tomb, my reverence had been displaced (how could I admire someone who had led so many men to their deaths and whose armies had killed so many people?), but I got accustomed to visiting with my baby son the ever-temperate mausoleum and peering at the raised polished red granite caskets of Grant and his wife. When I was a boy reading Civil War histories that were way over my head, I admired the slight and ruffled, soft-spoken commander, vividly imagining him to myself. At the turn of the 20th century, he was seen with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as one of the United States’s three great presidents. At that point, the younger Grant, a West Point graduate but now a civilian shopkeeper, had no idea that he himself would become the Union’s savior and the United States’s war hero in his own time, respected eventually even in the South.
Grant wrote his father at the start of the American Civil War. “THERE ARE BUT two parties now, Traitors & Patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter,” Ulysses S.
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