Making Things Git

GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. 556 pages. Little, Brown. $10.

Historian Lloyd Lewis wrote with bugles blaring, battle flags waving and exclamation marks used like bayonet points ("Blood! Blood! Blood!"). His style was perfectly suited to the fiery temper of William Tecumseh Sherman, and his classic Sherman: Fighting Prophet inspired a more restrained younger historian, Bruce Catton, to make a career out of the Civil War.

When Lewis died in 1949, he had completed only the first volume of a projected trilogy on Ulysses S. Grant. His widow, searching for someone to complete the work, selected Catton, then already on his way to a Pulitzer prize with Mr. Lincoln's Army and Glory Road. Using Lewis' abundant notes, Catton carried on. In Grant Moves South (1960), he brought Grant from his unpromising early career up to his tenacious triumph at Vicksburg. Now, in Grant Takes Command, he follows the taciturn-little general to his day of final victory at Appomattox.

A Mystery to Himself. "I had never met Lewis," Catton recalls, "and I realized that our styles were different. But we had much the same attitude toward the war and toward Grant." As it turned out, this was one of those rare literary legacies in which, considering the subject, the heir is apparently superior to the original author. Just as Lewis was ideal as Sherman's biographer, so Catton's quiet lucidity and laconic humor are precisely what is needed to amplify and examine Grant's elusive but enduring qualities.

Ulysses S. Grant was not an easy man to understand, even for those who knew him best. Sherman, his most successful subordinate and closest comrade in arms, once cried out in frustration: "To me he is a mystery, and I believe he is a mystery to himself." Lincoln, when asked what sort of man Grant was, replied: "He's the quietest little fellow you ever saw." Then the President added: "The only evidence you have that he's in any place is that he makes things git! Wherever he is, things move."

Grant was a strange blend of phlegm and flame. During the eerie Battle of the Wilderness, he spent the day receiving dispatches, issuing orders--and whittling on twigs. When the battle was over, while hundreds were still burning to death in a forest incinerated by gunfire (a dying Confederate cried over and over again: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"), Grant decided he could do no more, went to bed and within minutes was sleeping like a baby. Catton gives another glimpse of this side of Grant's nature by comparing the way he and Sherman smoked cigars: "Grant liked to lean back, taking his ease, smoking meditatively, enjoying it; Sherman got at it with energy, `as if it were a duty to be finished in the shortest imaginable time,' destroying his cigar as rapidly as possible."

Yet Grant, the slowpoke cigar smoker, was a man who, when astride a high-spirited horse, seemed possessed by demons. Says Catton: "On all ordinary affairs, in battle or out of it, Grant weighed the odds unemotionally, but a horse that was lightning-fast and half-wild always presented a challenge that he could not resist." Once, when Grant was at West Point, a classmate warned about a particularly mean animal: "That horse will kill you some day." Grant casually answered: "Well, I can't die but once." It may well have been this same streak of boldness--some called it recklessness--that many years later caused Grant to send Sherman on the march to the sea, during which he had to live off the land without supply lines.

Battle v. Bottle. Catton effectively demolishes some myths about Grant. One is that Grant was a political innocent; the fact is that Grant wove his way through the seething jealousies of the Army of the Potomac with consummate political skill. He rid himself of powerful politicians-play ing-general--John A. McClernand and Ben Butler for instance--in such a manner that they never knew quite what had hit them. Again, Grant's detractors, then and now, insist that he achieved final victory only through attrition, drawing upon the almost limitless manpower of the North. In truth, during the campaign that led to Appomattox, Grant's attacking Army of the Potomac often fell far short of the 2-to-1 superiority considered necessary to take the offense against Robert E. Lee's entrenched defenders.

His latest book will be Catton's last about Grant. For one thing, Lewis' notes do not include Grant's presidency. Another factor may also be involved. Catton admits he found one task onerous in carrying out his literary trust. "The irritating thing in writing about Grant," he says, "is that you constantly have to explain that Grant was not an alcoholic. I got tired of having to do this." As it happens, Catton is at his least persuasive in defending Grant's drinking bouts--which unquestionably did take place. That being the case, Catton might understandably be reluctant to take on the Reconstruction period, when being President was a job likely to drive a more abstemious man than Ulysses S. Grant to the bottle.

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