'He Ascribed Credit for Terminating the War'

In 2011, the late Helen Pinkerton sent me a copy of her encyclopedic Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2010). At the front of the book she wrote: 

“For Patrick Kurp, who shares a deep interest in the War, and who also is a great admirer of U.S. Grant, the finest general of the War.”

 

Helen dedicated the book to four of her paternal ancestors who served in the U.S. military, including her great-grandfather, “Pvt. Josias Pinkerton (1832-1896), Co. H, 25^th Iowa Infantry, who served under Grant from Chickasaw Bayou [December 1862] to Missionary Ridge [November 1863] . . . [and went on to serve under Sherman for the balance of the War].”

 

Like Herman Melville, about whom she published a book, Helen never made a distinction between Union and Confederate losses during the Civil War. All were Americans. Like Melville, she condemned slavery and the sundering of the Union while remaining sympathetic to the depredations suffered by the South during the War. Grant, too, sought a nuanced understanding of the War for all parties. In the final words to his final chapter in Personal Memoirs (1885), Grant writes:

 

“[T]he war between the States was a very bloody and a very costly war. One side or the other had to yield principles they deemed dearer than life before it could be brought to an end. I commanded the whole of the mighty host engaged on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy. It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to the end.”

 

Another cause for American pride is the remarkable fact that two of our finest writers, Lincoln and Grant, also served as presidents. In her essay “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word,” Marianne Moore writes:

 

“With consummate reverence for God, with insight that illumined his every procedure as a lawyer, that was alive in his every decision as President with civilian command of an army at bay, Lincoln was notable in his manner of proffering consolation; studiously avoiding insult when relieving an officer of his command; instantaneous with praise. To General Grant—made commander of the Union army after his brilliant flanking maneuver at Vicksburg—he said, ‘As the country trusts you, so, under God, it will sustain you.’ To Grant ‘alone’ he ascribed credit for terminating the war.”

 

Grant was born two-hundred years ago today, on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on the Ohio River near Cincinnati. He died July 23, 1885, at Moreau, N.Y., in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

 

[The excellent “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word” can be found in Lincoln for the Ages (ed. Ralph G. Newman, 1960); A Marianne Moore Reader (1961); and The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986).]