Ulysses S. Grant has experienced something of a moment recently. In the past decade, Grant has been the subject of lengthy biographies by Ronald C. White and Ron Chernow.[1] Other historians have reassessed Grant’s presidency.[2] Still other scholars have produced important books about Grant’s generalship, including, but not limited to, Timothy B. Smith’s masterful five-volume study of the Vicksburg Campaign.[3] These books are welcome because they help refute traditional portrayals of Grant’s presidency and add more nuance to scholarly understandings of Grant the military man.
In Soldier of Destiny, John Reeves begins with Grant’s resignation from the army in 1854, traces his life over the next decade, and ends with Grant’s appointment as lieutenant general in 1864. Reeves is intrigued by how a man who resigned from the army because of his drinking rose to such commanding heights ten years later. Reeves offers a fairly straightforward narrative history of Grant’s life that covers all the events one would expect. He also discusses Grant’s ideas about slavery and Grant’s drinking. When he resigned from the army, Grant told a friend that “whoever hears of me in ten years, will hear of a well-to-do old Missouri farmer” (p. 7).
After resigning, Grant made his way east from California, back to his wife Julia and his two small children. Grant’s family lived at White Haven, Julia’s parents’ estate. Grant had always wanted to be a farmer and life at White Haven offered a chance to become one. However, at White Haven, he was entangled with slavery. Julia’s father, Colonel Frederick Dent, owned dozens of enslaved people, hated “Yankees and abolitionists,” and “served on the finance committee on the St. Louis Anti-Abolition Society” (p. 11).
Thus, Grant personally benefited from enslaved labor, and “being a northerner surrounded by slave owners was a price Ulysses was willing to pay” for the chance to become a farmer at White Haven (p. 36). Indeed, Grant was “highly reliant on the institution just four years before the outbreak of the Civil War” (p. 45). Although Julia “convinced herself that White Haven was a happy, desirable place for its enslaved community,” the reality of life was very different than what she remembered (p. 50).
Grant “actively participated in the slave culture of St. Louis prior to the Civil War,” although evidence suggests that he was not an effective manager of enslaved laborers (p. 55). The lifestyle Grant provided for his family was “dependent on the ownership of human property,” which did not “seem to trouble Ulysses all that much” (p. 82). He was similar to many of his contemporaries, North and South, who made their livelihoods based on slavery and were not particularly bothered by the peculiar institution. The Panic of 1857 dramatically altered the trajectory of Grant’s life.
At the beginning of that year, his future seemed promising because he was managing White Haven, one of the largest estates in St. Louis County. However, Grant’s stake in White Haven was tenuous and the Panic of 1857 put the estate in jeopardy. To make matters worse, he began suffering from illness in 1858. Grant and his family eventually relocated to Galena, Illinois, to take a position in his father’s leather store. Although Grant moved from a slave state to a free state, his attitudes about slavery did not change. He remained “ambivalent at best on slavery” and disliked abolitionists and the Republican Party (p. 90).
He was, however, uncompromisingly pro-Union. Only a few days after the firing on Fort Sumter, Grant wrote to his father that “there are but two parties now, Traitors & Patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter” (p. 98). Like many of his contemporaries in the North, Grant’s full-throated commitment to the Union did not al‐ ter his ideas about slavery and race. Given his previous military experience, it was hardly a surprise that Grant quickly became involved in the war effort.
He began as an assistant quartermaster, then became the mustering officer at Camp Yates, then the colonel of the Seventh Congressional District Regiment (later renamed the Twenty-First Illinois), and then brigadier general of volunteers on August 5, 1861.
Reeves follows Grant from the Battle of Belmont to Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, General Orders No. 11, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and, finally, his promotion to lieutenant general. Reeves avoids over‐ simplifying the relationship between Grant and Henry W. Halleck, examines the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, and discusses how Grant became a hero to many after their capture.
It is undeniable, Reeves posits, that Grant was overconfident and unprepared before the Battle of Shiloh. Thus, Grant bears the responsibility for the “shocking demoralization of a large part of the Army of the Tennessee on April 6,” although he also “demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to endure an onslaught that would have broken the spirit of an ordinary commander un‐ der such a strain” (p. 164).
Reeves analyzes Grant’s viciously anti-Semitic General Orders No. 11 that expelled Jews from his department. This order “reflected his growing dissatisfaction with cotton speculation that appeared to violate departmental regulations” but was ultimately “a black mark on his character” (pp. 190, 198).
Reeves then offers an account of the conquest of Vicksburg and Grant’s triumph at Chattanooga. He concludes with his promotion to lieutenant general. Although Grant’s prospects in 1854 seemed unpromising, on March 10, 1864, he “reached the pinnacle of his profession with his oldest son by his side. It had been a truly astonishing reversal of fortune” (p. 238).
As he examines Grant throughout the years 1861-64, Reeves returns again and again to his discussion of Grant and slavery. Grant “clearly wasn’t an abolitionist or a Republican during the summer of 1861, though some of his old associates in St. Louis suspected he was” (p. 100). In November 1861, Grant wrote that he did not approve of his father and the press’s tendency toward launching a “war upon slavery” (p. 117).
He argued that this might be the ultimate outcome but that the “portion of the press that advocates the beginning of such a war now, are as great enemies of their country as if they were open and avowed secessionists” (p. 118).
In 1862, Grant’s “moral ambivalence on the issue of slavery was evident,” and he was “indifferent to emancipation” (p. 180). His evolution, when it came, was sudden. The Army of the Tennessee during the Vicksburg Campaign “brought about one of the greatest socioeconomic transformations in United States history” by freeing tens of thousands of enslaved people and enrolling thousands of Black men into the US Army (p. 214).
Grant also wrote Abraham Lincoln affirming his support for Black soldiers. It is ironic, Reeves comments, “that a man who benefited dir‐ ectly from slavery for the previous nine years” nevertheless “played a leading role in destroying that wicked institution” (p. 215). Interestingly, Reeves never accounts for the evolution of Grant’s attitudes and does not consider Grant as a “practical liberator.”[4]
If anything, the fact that Reeves emphasizes Grant’s ideas about slavery throughout the book, only to pay comparatively little attention to why Grant ultimately embraced emancipation, leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied. Perhaps Reeves might have replaced the word “redemption” in the book’s subtitle—which is a problematic word because of the so-called Redeemers who overthrew reconstructed governments in the southern states during the final years of Grant’s presidency—with “evolution” and then spent more time asking why this evolution occurred.
This issue aside, Soldier of Destiny offers a good overview of an important ten-year period in the life of Grant and the life of the United States. The ground this volume covers will be familiar for scholars, but Reeves is a good writer and has an eye for vivid quotes. Anyone interested in the US Civil War should think about reading this book.
Notes [1]. Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (Random House, 2016); and Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin Press, 2017). [2]. See, for example, Charles W. Calhoun, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (University Press of Kansas, 2017); Mary Stockwell, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018); and Fer‐ gus M. Bordewich, Klan Wars: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023). [3]. See, for example, David Alan Powell, The Impulse of Victory: Ulysses S. Grant at Chat‐ tanooga (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020); Timothy B. Smith, The Union Assaults at Vicks‐ burg: Grant Attacks Pemberton, May 17-22, 1863 (University Press of Kansas, 2020); Timothy B. Smith, The Siege of Vicksburg: Climax of the Cam‐ paign to Open the Mississippi River, May 23-July 4, 1863 (University Press of Kansas, 2021); Timothy B. Smith, Early Struggles for Vicksburg: The Mis‐ sissippi Central Campaign and Chickasaw Bayou, October 25-December 31, 1862 (University Press of Kansas, 2022); Timothy B. Smith, Bayou Battles for Vicksburg: The Swamp and River Expeditions, January 1-April 30, 1863 (University Press of Kan‐ sas, 2023); and Timothy B. Smith, The Inland Cam‐ paign for Vicksburg: Five Battles in Seventeen Days, May 1-17, 1863 (University Press of Kansas, 2024). [4]. Kristofer A. Teters, Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater During the Civil War (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018). H-Net Reviews
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