The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.

He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

Even when he played, he made a business of it.

The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill—mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries—passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s).

Grant, for reasons perhaps partly inborn and partly acquired, rarely revisited choices once made. He planned according to the information at hand; he prepared for all reasonable contingencies; he decided what to do as events unfolded. Then, calm in the conviction that he could have done no more, he accepted what destiny delivered.

Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.

Proving himself to himself was no small matter.

Gen. Scott saw more through the eyes of his staff officers than through his own.

He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind's eye. It was one of the secrets of his military success.

what white Southerners called “redemption” and others deemed simply the return to power of the Democrats, who sufficiently intimidated, cheated and otherwise discouraged Republicans, including most of the freedmen, that they counted for little in Southern politics. With any Democratic presidential nominee guaranteed the South, any Republican had to perform overwhelmingly in the North.

then—and a shirt that had not seen a wash-